Author Archives: Karen Osborne

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
— Les Miserables

The universe is having a good day at work.

The Hubble telescope has opened up the stars to our perusal and the mysteries of space for our faint human eyes.

Among these are a number of photos where people claim to see the face of God, or the breath of God, or evidence of God’s presence in the gases and stars of a nebula. This facial recognition is a phenomenon known as pareidolia, a phenomenon where the brain sees faces in places where faces aren’t supposed to be. Pareidolia is what you’re feeling when you see the face of Jesus or Mary in your grilled cheese, in the clouds or on the front of a car, when conspiracy theorists wave around pictures of Mars’ Cydonia crater, or — in one of the earliest reported instances of the phenomena — when you have your face turned towards the Man in the Moon. Pareidolia also exists in technology, when facial recognition software yanks out a hill formation or a funny sign and recognizes it as a set of human eyes, a nose and a mouth.

Hi guys! Can I come? Huh, can I? Please?!

Here’s a video that shows pareidolia in action, with a creator that explains how he sees the “Face of God” in one particular stellar formation:

Why do we see faces everywhere? Well, it could be a function of our brains trying to make sense of information and sort things into familiar patterns. That’s where our expectations come in — artists might be more oriented towards seeing the Mona Lisa or Dali’s Scream in their breakfast and smile with the coincidence, while the religious might see Mary or the Buddha and see it as a miracle or proof of the supernatural. We’re certainly wired for it from an evolutionary perspective, according to Dr. Nouchine Hadjikhani of Harvard University — in their first hours of life, babies will fixate on other human faces, whether it’s a mother, a father, or a nurse.

The “Face on Mars,” which really only looks like that because of the way the sun was
facing at that moment. (We hope. We know what Doctor Who says about life on Mars…)

At Sacred Earthlings, we’ll propose that pareidolia exists because, in some way, we are looking for the face of God.

At any rate, pareidolia can be lucrative as well as scientifically interesting. Here are some instances where fake faces made their viewers a very real mint:

— The Nun Bun, an image of Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun at Nashville’s Bongo Java;
— A 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich with the image of Mary;
— A chicken nugget that resembles George Washington;
— and a house in Swansea, England that looks like Hitler.

As for pareidolia in everyday life, all you have to do is go outside and look out to the street.

Disney even made a movie about it. Beep beep!

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“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious.
If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos

When I was 14, I traveled to Colombia with my mother to visit some friends who lived in Medellin. They took us on a tour of the beautiful cities and even more beautiful countryside, where we stayed with some of the most amazing people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. The trip was a life-changer for me, and I’m not just saying that because I was introduced to the wonder of Colombiana and Manzana Postobon.

One night, on a back road a few hours from Manizales, Rafael pulled the Jeep over and had us get out and turn our eyes to the night sky. I had always heard the galaxy described as “The Milky Way,” but until that point I’d only seen the bare, few points of light one could identify over the light pollution in my northeastern American city. The Colombian sky was nothing like that. On this rural route, the old constellations were swallowed up by thousands and thousands of suns and stars, and winding through the center of it all was the white, cloudy, star-stuffed center of the galaxy. It was a dizzying kaleidoscope, an unbelievable treat — and I’ve never been back to a place remote enough to match it.

There were literally no words. It was like this, only… with more stars. A lot more stars.

If this were Roddenberry’s Star Trek, Banks’ Culture or even or even Alien Nation, we’d have plenty of company in those stars. Aliens with five legs, two heads, green blood and black-diamond eyes; intelligent amoebas that live in nitrogen-gylcerin oceans; beings of pure energy who long ago uploaded their consciousnesses into computers we can’t even begin to understand.

Yet, in reality, we are greeted with a deafening silence whenever we look up at the sky.

Where is everyone?

There are a number of theories on this, of course. One is that we are truly singular; the first, or the only, species to grow intelligent enough to break atmo. The second is that we are extremely common, but that due to the almost incomprehensible age of the universe, the thousands upon thousands of alien societies we’re expecting to find have already risen and died, or have not yet been born. A third is that there truly is some sort of warp-speed Galactic Federation out there, but that due to our backwater location — we’re on an undiscovered Pacific island, we’re an an isolated Amazon tribe — we have no idea it exists. And there’s even a fourth: that aliens are everywhere, but they’re so advanced they think we’re no better than monkeys or amoebas.

Here’s a really great analysis on the subject by Tim Urban on Quartz, originally published on WaitButWhy.

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Milky Way by Abdul Rahman, CC licensed

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