Some of us have always believed that there is life on Mars, and maybe on other planets too. But when real pictures taken by one of NASA’s robots showed a female-like figure on Mars’ surface, these “believers” must have gone crazy. After the United States’ space agency released the photos taken by its robot, called Spirit, several web sites have started to argue suggesting that the figure “caught” on tape by Spirit could be alive. Without even knowing for sure how aliens, that is “people” from Mars, look like, these web sites and the people behind them started to develop a fascinating story.

However, as expected, the story hasn’t been able to evolve into something else, not even into a spicy sci-fi story. What people thought to be a female figure is nothing else than a rock, astronomers said. In fact the photos taken by Spirit aren’t even so accurate so that people could recognize human figures in them; Mars is about 35 million miles away from Earth and this is also why NASA used robots with cameras for exploration instead of telescopes.

But why and how all this craziness started, if we are all rational beings and know all these facts? Space researchers can’t explain, but psychologists can. It is called pareidolia and it is a very common phenomenon. The reason many people see a female-figure on the Mars’ landscape is the same reason that we see faces in clouds, for example.

Unfortunately for the ones who believe in aliens, it wasn’t their lucky day. Alien life still can’t be proved!