Humans have seen strange things on Mars for centuries, and the reason for this is that Mars is one of the closest potentially habitable planets or maybe it's close enough to us to get a good look at it.

Whatever the reason, Mars, with its rocky surface that bears special psychological signs sometimes, has always deceived us humans, as people have seen over different times strange things that appear on its surface, ranging from channels to frightening human faces, trees, insects, etc., but these strange things It has been refuted and refuted.

Herschel believed that the oceans are the dark areas on the planet and the bright areas are the land areas (NASA)

land and oceans

The beginning was in 1784, when William Herschel, the famous British astronomer who discovered Uranus to be the first planet to be discovered with a telescope, wrote that the dark areas on Mars represent the oceans, while the bright areas represent the land.

According to NASA, Herschel believed that intelligent beings inhabited Mars and enjoyed conditions similar to ours.

According to the report, published by Live Science, Herschel's belief prevailed for a century.

Other astronomers claimed that it is also possible to observe vegetation in those bright areas that Herschel considered land.

As odd as this belief may be, Herschel's many astronomical contributions have helped preserve his scientific reputation, with his Mars theories at the bottom of his autobiography.

Schiaparelli's map of the surface of Mars (Wikipedia - Meyer's German Encyclopedia)

Natural or artificial channels?

Among the other things seen on the surface of the Red Planet were those grooves discovered by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877 using a telescope, and Schiaparelli named them "Canali", an Italian word for "channels", which are waterways. normal.

While the completion of the digging of the Suez Canal in 1869 dominated the minds of people at the time as one of the engineering wonders of the age, according to NASA, the artificial channels received widespread public and media attention.

Hence, the Schiaparli Canals were translated into an incorrect English word meaning "canals", which led many people to conclude that Mars had experienced intelligent life that built a system of waterways.

Lowell's drawings of artificial channels on the surface of Mars (Wikipedia-Percival Lowell)

This wrong term spread after the astronomer Percival Lowell - who discovered the planet Pluto - issued a book in 1895 entitled "Mars", which carried drawings and lines for those channels.

Lowell followed this up with a second book promoting his ideas called Mars as the Abode of Life.

In that 1908 book, Lowell defended his complete theory that intelligent life on Mars created these aqueducts to transport water from the polar peaks to the tropics.

This theory was disproved in the early 20th century, when it was established that these "channels" were nothing more than optical illusions seen when Mars is viewed with poor-quality telescopes.

The mountains and craters appear as if they are connected to each other through a straight line, and later spectral analysis of the light coming from Mars showed that there was no water on its surface.

An image of the face of Mars spotted by the Viking 1 spacecraft (NASA)

face on mars

This story began when, in 1976, NASA published an image of an interesting geographical formation on Mars that had been taken by the Viking 1 spacecraft.

Even more than 40 years later, the image of the "face on Mars" continues to inspire modern myths and conspiracy theories, with many people believing it to be an artificial skeleton built by an ancient Martian civilization.

Simply looking at the mountain from another angle, as taken by the Mars Express spacecraft or other spacecraft, the shape of the mountain does not appear like a face at all.

Hence, it is the shadows of the formations on the mountain that make it look like a face in the first image.

Pictures of the face of Mars from another angle taken by many spacecraft later (NASA)

However, this psychological phenomenon in which the mind approaches random patterns - usually a sound or an image - to include them within what it knows of familiar patterns known as "Pareidolia".

Mars trees

Seven years before his death, famed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey written to coincide with the movie of the same name, announced that he had spotted vegetation, including trees, in New images of Mars were taken by the Mars Global Surveyor, which was orbiting the planet at the time.

According to the Live Science report, Clark noted - in a phone call at the time - that "a good examination of these images actually shows something that moves and changes with the seasons, and is believed - at the very least - to be plants."

The phenomenon of Mars springs that Arthur Clarke saw as trees and on the right an imaginary image to explain it (Wikipedia - NASA - Ron Miller)

However, what Clark saw on the surface of Mars is nothing but a phenomenon known to scientists as Martian "spiders" or "Martian geysers", as the reason for this phenomenon is due to the seasonal melting of the ice cap that consists of a large proportion of carbon dioxide, It is located at the poles of Mars.

This causes the appearance of fountains of fine sand rushing high in the cold air, and this phenomenon continues for months and then disappears and reappears in its season.

A Martian person and a face of Gandhi

In another strange incident, the Spirit spacecraft in 2007 captured a scene that looked clearly like a person wearing a robe kneeling in prayer.

Mars person captured by NASA's Spirit spacecraft

The rover took this image when it was wandering among the hills of Mars known as the "Columbia Hills" located at the "Gusev Crater" on the surface of Mars, but the panoramic image of that area shows that it is just a rock.

With the launch of Google Mars maps in 2009, users can now wander across the Red Planet to discover its intriguing outcrops.


Using those maps, a young Italian named Matteo Ianno discovered an image on Mars that looked like that of Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi.

However, the high-resolution images of this figure show that it is not a mountain or hill, but rather a crater that actually looks like a human head from its profile.

Here, pareidolia appears again in order to deceive us by explaining the strange patterns that we cannot explain.

Picture of the hole that looks like the head of Mahatma Gandhi (social networking sites)

blue spider and ladybug creative bump

In 2019, the European Space Agency took pictures showing a huge hairy spider stretching its legs across the mountains of Mars, but the reality is that these long legs are nothing but corridors of hundreds of small hurricanes.

Seeing reptiles appears to be a frequent occurrence on Mars, as entomologist William Romoser claimed that he was able to see beetles, other insects and reptiles on the surface of Mars after examining images taken by NASA's Mars vehicles, which show many ovals, but these images are not of good quality. Enough to make us claim something so extraordinary.

Red dust showers left running tracks of a cartoon character (NASA, JPL, Caltech)

At some point in the summer of 2019, a space object slammed into Mars' southern ice cap, sending showers of red dust upwards. The patch resembles the running footprints of a cartoon character.

strange green rock

Although Mars is famous for being the red planet, what is the secret of the green rock recently discovered by the Perseverance rover?

Scientists do not know the reason for the presence of this green rock on the Red Planet (social networking sites)

At the moment, scientists do not have an answer to it, but they are wondering whether it was the result of an external body colliding with Mars.

The spacecraft has already shocked a part of the rock, which is about 15 centimeters long, to vaporize a part of it and study it.