Michell shows us a photograph of the Sun taken in X-ray light which looks vaguely like a face and informs us that ‘followers of Gurdjieff see the face of their Master’ in the solar corona. Innumerable faces in trees, mountains and boulders all over the world are inferred to be the product of ancient wisdom. Perhaps some are: it’s a good practical joke, as well as a tempting religious symbol, to pile stones so from afar they look like a giant face.
The view that most of these forms are patterns natural to rock-forming processes and the bilateral symmetry of plants and animals, plus a little natural selection – all processed through the human-biased filter of our perception – Michell describes as ‘materialism’ and a ‘nineteenth-century delusion’. ‘Conditioned by rationalist beliefs, our view of the world is duller and more confined than nature intended.’ By what process he has plumbed the intentions of Nature is not revealed.
Of the images he presents, Michell concludes that
their mystery remains essentially untouched, a constant source of wonder, delight and speculation. All we know for sure is that nature created them and at the same time gave us the apparatus to perceive them and minds to appreciate their endless fascination. For the greatest profit and enjoyment they should be viewed as nature intended, with the eye of innocence, unclouded by theories and preconceptions, with the manifold vision, innate in all of us, that enriches and dignifies human life, rather than with the cultivated single vision of the dull and opinionated.
Perhaps the most famous spurious claim of a portentous pattern involves the canals of Mars. First observed in 1877, they were seemingly confirmed by a succession of dedicated professional astronomers peering through large telescopes all over the world. A network of single and double straight lines was reported, crisscrossing the Martian surface and with such uncanny geometrical regularity that they could only be of intelligent origin. Evocative conclusions were drawn about a parched and dying planet populated by an older and wiser technical civilization dedicated to conservation of water resources. Hundreds of canals were mapped and named. But, oddly, they avoided showing up on photographs. The human eye, it was suggested, could remember the brief instants of perfect atmospheric transparency, while the undiscriminating photographic plate averaged the few clear with the many blurry moments. Some astronomers saw the canals. Many did not. Perhaps certain observers were more skilled at seeing canals. Or perhaps the whole business was some kind of perceptual delusion. Much of the idea of Mars as an abode of life, as well as the prevalence of ‘Martians’ in popular fiction, derives from the canals. I myself grew up steeped in this literature, and when I found myself an experimenter on the Manner 9 mission to Mars -the first spacecraft to orbit the red planet – naturally I was interested to see what the real circumstances were. With Mariner 9 and with Viking, we were able to map the planet pole-to-pole, detecting features hundreds of times smaller than the best that could be seen from Earth. I found, not altogether to my surprise, not a trace of canals. There were a few more or less linear features that had been made out through the telescope – for example, a 5,000-kilometre-long rift valley that would have been hard to miss. But the hundreds of ‘classical’ canals carrying water from the polar caps through the arid deserts to the parched equatorial cities simply did not exist. They were an illusion, some malfunction of the human hand-eye-brain combination at the limit of resolution when we peer through an unsteady and turbulent atmosphere.
Even a succession of professional scientists – including famous astronomers who had made other discoveries that are confirmed and now justly celebrated – can make serious, even profound errors in pattern recognition. Especially where the implications of what we think we are seeing seem to be profound, we may not exercise adequate self-discipline and self-criticism. The Martian canal myth constitutes an important cautionary tale.
For the canals, spacecraft missions provided the means of correcting our misapprehensions. But it is also true that some of the most haunting claims of unexpected patterns emerge from spacecraft exploration. In the early 1960s, I urged that we be attentive to the possibility of finding the artefacts of ancient civilizations, either those indigenous to a given worlds or those constructed by visitors from elsewhere. I didn’t imagine that this would be easy or probable, and I certainly did not suggest that, on so important a matter, anything short of iron-clad evidence would be worth considering.
Beginning with John Glenn’s evocative report of ‘fireflies’ surrounding his space capsule, every time an astronaut reported seeing something not immediately understood, there were those who deduced ‘aliens’. Prosaic explanations – specks of paint flecking off the ship in the space environment, say – were dismissed with contempt. The lure of the marvellous blunts our critical faculties. (As if a man become a moon is not marvel enough.)
Around the time of the Apollo lunar landings, many nonexperts – owners of small telescopes, flying saucer zealots, writers for aerospace magazines – pored over the returned photographs seeking anomalies that NASA scientists and astronauts had overlooked. Soon there were reports of gigantic Latin letters and Arabic numerals inscribed on the lunar surface, pyramids, highways, crosses, glowing UFOs. Bridges were reported on the Moon, radio antennas, the tracks of enormous crawling vehicles, and the devastation left by machines able to slice craters in two. Every one of these claims, though, turns out to be a natural lunar geological formation misjudged by amateur analysts, internal reflections in the optics of the astronauts’ Hasselblad cameras, and the like. Some enthusiasts discerned the long shadows of ballistic missiles – Soviet missiles, it was ominously confided, aimed at America. The rockets, also described as ‘spires’, turn out to be low hills casting long shadows when the Sun is near the lunar horizon. A little trigonometry dispels the mirage.
These experiences also provide fair warning: for a complex terrain sculpted by unfamiliar processes, amateurs (and sometimes even professionals) examining photographs, especially near the limit of resolution, may get into trouble. Their hopes and fears, the excitement of possible discoveries of great import, may overwhelm the usual sceptical and cautious approach of science.
If we examine available surface images of Venus, occasionally a peculiar landform swims into view – as, for example, a rough portrait of Joseph Stalin discovered by American geologists analysing Soviet orbital radar imagery. No one maintains, I gather, that unreconstructed Stalinists had doctored the magnetic tapes, or that the former Soviets were engaged in engineering activities of unprecedented and hitherto unrevealed scale on the surface of Venus – where every spacecraft to land has been fried in an hour or two. The odds are overwhelming that this feature, whatever it is, is due to geology. The same is true of what seems to be a portrait of the cartoon character Bugs Bunny on the Uranian moon Ariel. A Hubble space telescope image of Titan in the near-infrared shows clouds roughly configured to make a world-sized smiling face. Every planetary scientist has a favourite example.
The astronomy of the Milky Way also is replete with imagined likenesses – for example, the Horsehead, Eskimo, Owl, Homunculus, Tarantula and North American Nebulae, all irregular clouds of gas and dust, illuminated by bright stars and each on a scale that dwarfs our solar system. When astronomers mapped the distribution of galaxies out to a few hundred million light years, they found themselves outlining a crude human form which has been called ‘the Stickman’. The configuration is understood as something like enormous adjacent soap bubbles, the galaxies formed on the surface of adjacent bubbles and almost no galaxies in the interiors. This makes it quite likely that they will mark out a pattern with bilateral symmetry something like the Stickman.
Mars is much more clement than Venus, although the Viking landers provided no compelling evidence for life. Its terrain is extremely heterogeneous and diverse. With 100,000 or so close-up photographs available, it is not surprising that claims have been made over the years about something unusual on Mars. There is, for example, a cheerful ‘happy face’ sitting inside a Martian impact crater 8 kilometres (5 miles) across, with a set of radial splash marks outside, making it look like the conventional representation of a smiling Sun. But no one claims that this has been engineered by an advanced (and excessively genial) Martian civilization, perhaps to attract our attention. We recognize that, with objects of all sizes falling out of the sky, with the surface rebounding, slumping and reconfiguring itself after each impact, and with ancient water and mudflows and modern windborne sand sculpting the surface, a wide variety of landforms must be generated. If we scrutinize 100,000 pictures, it’s not surprising that occasionally we’ll come upon something like a face. With our brains programmed for this from infancy, it would be amazing if we couldn’t find one here and there.