Did aliens build a human face on Mars?
In 1976, when NASA’s Viking Orbiter took this image (inset) of what appeared to be an artificially created human face on Mars, many UFO enthusiasts were fearing an imminent alien invasion. The feature remarkably resembled the face of a human but, like the supposed ‘man in the moon’, it was confirmed as nothing more than an illusion.
To prove this, NASA took another image (main) of the ‘face’ in 2001 with the Mars Global Surveyor. It showed that dust had continued to shift, and changed the appearance of the feature. Astronomers knew it was nothing more than randomly arranged dust on the surface, coincidentally resembling a human face, but that didn’t stop the alien conspiracies from circulating at the time.