Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

The Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars
for aerospace magazines - pored over the returned photographs
seeking anomalies that NASA scientists and astronauts had
overlooked. Soon there were reports of gigantic Latin letters and
Arabic numerals inscribed on the lunar surface, pyramids, highways,
crosses, glowing UFOs. Bridges were reported on the
Moon, radio antennas, the tracks of enormous crawling vehicles,
and the devastation left by machines able to slice craters in two.
Every one of these claims, though, turns out to be a natural lunar
geological formation misjudged by amateur analysts, internal
reflections in the optics of the astronauts' Hasselblad cameras,
and the like. Some enthusiasts discerned the long shadows of
ballistic missiles - Soviet missiles, it was ominously confided,
aimed at America. The rockets, also described as 'spires', turn out
to be low hills casting long shadows when the Sun is near the lunar
horizon. A little trigonometry dispels the mirage.
These experiences also provide fair warning: for a complex
terrain sculpted by unfamiliar processes, amateurs (and sometimes
even professionals) examining photographs, especially near
the limit of resolution, may get into trouble. Their hopes and
fears, the excitement of possible discoveries of great import, may
overwhelm the usual sceptical and cautious approach of science.
If we examine available surface images of Venus, occasionally a
peculiar landform swims into view - as, for example, a rough
portrait of Joseph Stalin discovered by American geologists
analysing Soviet orbital radar imagery. No one maintains, I
gather, that unreconstructed Stalinists had doctored the magnetic
tapes, or that the former Soviets were engaged in engineering
activities of unprecedented and hitherto unrevealed scale on the
surface of Venus - where every spacecraft to land has been fried in
an hour or two. The odds are overwhelming that this feature,
whatever it is, is due to geology. The same is true of what seems to
be a portrait of the cartoon character Bugs Bunny on the Uranian
moon Ariel. A Hubble space telescope image of Titan in the
near-infrared shows clouds roughly configured to make a worldsized
smiling face. Every planetary scientist has a favourite
example.
The astronomy of the Milky Way also is replete with imagined
likenesses - for example, the Horsehead, Eskimo, Owl,
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