NASA's Curiosity rover beams back truly stunning images of Mars on a regular basis, but some have just a touch of the mysterious.
Such was the case for one photo that apparently showed a "partially cloaked" female figure standing on a Martian dune, UFO Sightings Daily pointed out. The website even suggested it was more likely to be a living being than a statue, as a statue "would eroded and destroyed easily" by the time Curiosity spotted it.
Click here for a high resolution look at the raw image NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shared.
The photo then made the rounds all over the Internet, with many and more dissecting it, studying the "woman" closely or just declaring how eerie it is.
Richard Tribou, a reporter for The Orlando Sentinel, likened it to the woman in "Liberty Leading the People," a famous painting by Eugène Delacroix depicting France's July Revolution in 1830.
According to Time, the image could just be our minds playing tricks on us. The magazine pointed to a previous report from its science expert, Jeffrey Kluger, on an image that some people thought was some sort of giant crab clinging to a cliff on Mars. He said it is a phenomenon in which people see a familiar object in an overall unfamiliar setting.
"The pareidolia phenomenon is actually a deeply rooted one, something that helps infants focus on faces early and also allowed humans in the wild to spot danger easily-picking a potentially menacing human or animal peering out from a backdrop of leaves or scrub," Kluger wrote. "Yes, more often than not it's a false alarm, but better to overreact fifty times than under-react even once."
