The Red Planet is home to some genuine natural wonders, including Olympus Mons – the largest volcano in the entire Solar System – and the colossal Borealis Basin, which covers around 40 percent of the Martian surface. Yet in our attempts to explore this alien world, we’ve also stumbled upon a host of hoaxes and optical illusions, all of which have added to the mystique of our neighboring planet.
The Face Of Mars
Way back in 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 Orbiter beamed a bizarre and somewhat creepy image of Mars’s Cydonia region back to Earth. Staring back at the spacecraft’s camera was what looked like a giant human face bulging out of the ground, triggering the inevitable crackpot theories about a Martian civilization and its ritual architecture.
In reality, the face is no more than a light trick, caused by shadows that happened to fall in a particular arrangement at the moment the photograph was taken. Decades later, higher-resolution images of the same feature were snapped by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, revealing that the apparent face was in fact just a wide, flat-topped hill known as a mesa.
Planet Of The Apes
In 2020, a YouTuber put a match under yet another ridiculous Martian hypothesis by suggesting that an image taken by NASA’s Curiosity Rover showed a gorilla-like creature and its baby. Speculating that the figure could also be a kind of bear or even a statue, the influencer in question was quite clearly mistaking a pair of oddly shaped rocks for something much more scandalous.
Of course, people with certain agendas or ideologies will always see what they want to see, although it’s also worth bearing in mind that our brains are primed to find familiar shapes and patterns in places where they don’t actually exist. This psychological phenomenon – known as pareidolia – explains why we so often see faces in inanimate objects, and is also the reason why people keep finding unexpected objects on Mars.
A Doorway To Nowhere
It might look like a door, but it’s probably just a natural feature. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Another image captured by Curiosity in May 2022 sent conspiracy theorists into a bit of a whizz after some pointed out that it appeared to show a doorway leading into a rockface. Granted, the strange feature does look a lot like an artificial entrance, but there are plenty of factors to consider before jumping to any wild conclusions.
Shadows, perspective and natural rock formations can all quite easily have combined to create the resulting image, and offer a far more plausible explanation than some of those suggested by online alien hunters who are desperate to see the threshold to some sort of Martian temple.
The Spiders From Mars
The famous “spiders” are caused by seasonal temperature changes. Image credit: ESA/TGO/CaSSIS (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
We’re still searching for Ziggy Stardust, but we have at least spotted his bandmates, the Spiders From Mars. These insect-like formations were first photographed in 1972 by NASA’s Mariner 9 probe in a region called Angustus Labyrinthus – also known as Inca City – near the Red Planet’s south pole.
Fortunately, scientists have since confirmed that there is no giant race of Martian tarantulas, and have developed a hypothesis known as the Kieffer model to explain how these arachnoid shapes are formed. Essentially, it’s all to do with sunlight hitting layers of carbon dioxide that build up during the winter, turning them into gas which then cracks the overlaying ice as it escapes.
Zebra Rock
This is the only rock we’ve seen with this texture on Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
Not every oddity on Mars is an illusion, and scientists have been left flummoxed by a number of completely genuine geological freaks on this rust-colored world. One of the most intriguing examples comes from the Jezero Crater, where NASA’s Perseverance Rover spotted a very strange stripey rock in 2024.
Officially dubbed Freya Castle, the weird object has been nicknamed Zebra Rock – for obvious reasons – and has been described by researchers as having a texture unlike any other rock seen on Mars. Right now we know very little about its chemical composition, which makes it pretty difficult to explain the rock’s appearance, although the stripes may have formed as a result of igneous or metamorphic processes.
