14 DAY TRIAL // NASA's Curiosity rover made it on the surface of Mars in August 2012 and has been exploring landscapes in the Red Planet's Gale Crater ever since. The robotic explorer is yet to discover signs of life on this planet, but at least it's managed to snap some seriously cool photos.
One of these photos shows some rather odd rocks that many now claim look like an ancient cat statue and might just be proof that, eons ago, an entire civilization thrived on Mars. A civilization that worshiped really ugly cats above all other things, apparently.
The rocks that could rewrite Mars' entire history
Much to their shame, it was not scientists that first figured out that an ancient cat statue might be lying on Mars, just waiting to be pulled from the ground and restored. Thus, it was armchair astronomers that, while looking at NASA images, noticed the rocks' uncanny appearance.
To prove that the Martian rocks really do resemble a cat statue, they even went to the trouble of using good old MS Paint to illustrate where the mouth, the ears, the eyes and the nose of the feline all sit on the ground. Just scroll down to have a close look at the end result of their hard rock.
The really wacky thing is that, apparently, this ancient cat statue does not lie alone in Mars' Gale Crater. On the contrary, it's accompanied by a smaller statue of another creature whose identity is yet to be revealed. A Martian mouse, perhaps?
Seeing cat statues on Mars isn't entirely nuts
If we're going to be honest here, we have to admit that it will be a cryogenic day in hell before NASA's Curiosity rover actually finds an actual ancient cat statue or some other bizarre artifact on Mars. Why is it then that folks keep seeing such objects where there is nothing to see?
Well, scientists say that this happens because the human brain is hard-wired to identify familiar patterns in the world around us. Otherwise put, most of us cannot help but misinterpret somehow confusing visual stimuli coming our way and see animals or statues of animals in seriously weird places.
As researcher Kang Lee of the University of Toronto put it, “It's common for people to see non-existent features because human brains are uniquely wired to recognize faces, so that even when there's only a slight suggestion of facial features the brain automatically interprets it as a face.”
In case anyone was wondering, this ability of ours to see familiar objects and patterns all around us also explains why some people see Jesus or other celebs on toast, on bruised limbs or on tree logs. In fact, it wasn't long ago that a woman in the UK told the world that she saw Jesus inside her dog's ear.
