“Into the garbage chute, flyboy.” - Princess Leia

By Brian Thompson

I. The Setup

When Monet Sledge of Lorain, Ohio went in for an ultrasound in preparation for the birth of her first child, I’m sure she didn’t expect to meet Jesus Christ face to suffering face. Personally, I’ve never been able to make anything out of ultrasound pictures. They’re all fuzzy gray blobs to me. Of course, usually the fully formed and exo-wombed child is nothing but a gray blob to me. But even though I have trouble making heads or tails of an unborn baby’s head or tail, I don’t think I’d mistake the gaseous mass for Christ on the cross.

Ms. Sledge, however, has a broader worldview. And so does her sister Tequoia Smith, who also claims to make out the famous demigod and the implement of his untimely execution in the picture. “As soon as I saw it,” Smith said, “I was like oh my gosh.” Sledge sees the apparition as a sign that her baby is blessed. But before you start wondering why the son of God would bestow his blessings via prenatal technology, you should really ask yourself why Sledge and Smith are so willing to accept this vision in the first place.

Turns out, it’s kind of human nature.

II. The Findings

Pareidolia is the tendency of the human mind to organize chaos into order. You may look at the full moon and see nothing but a wasted opportunity for a kickass lunar base from which to launch your schemes of global domination, but other people arrange the craters and pockmarks into a face. You may look at a cloud and see only a premature end to your game of ultimate Frisbee (assuming, of course, you’re a douchebag), but others may see a horse or a car or an old man beating a donkey. To you, that slightly burned tortilla is just something to wrap around a fistful of chicken and guacamole, but to others, it’s the medium upon which Jesus’ portrait is painted.

The next time you hear about the Virgin Mary appearing in a beam of light or in the wood grain of a kitchen door or on the back of a grilled cheese sandwich, ask yourself if the person to whom she appeared happened to be a Catholic before their stunningly delicious revelation. One of the hallmarks of pareidolia is that we tend to project our own biases onto the chaos we subconsciously organize. While it’s now a widely discounted psychological tool, the famous Rorschach test was an exercise in pareidolia—hoping to provide some insight into a person’s psychological state by having them make patterns out of random ink blots. Whenever I look at one, I only see a hobo-bearded British comic book writer with fingers full of rings, but that’s just me. If I were more spiritually inclined, I might see the Buddha or the Prophet Mohammed. Though, if it was the second one, I’d probably have to immediately behead myself.

Usually pareidolia is just a harmless quirk of human instinct. Carl Sagan hypothesized that human beings once needed to automatically recognize other humans’ faces in order to protect themselves in the wild. I think it’s also quite likely that the ability to organize two dots and a line into eyes and a mouth might help one see a lion’s face creeping up in the dark. Nowadays, though, pareidolia can take a much more ridiculous and even harmful turn. Seeing Elvis’ face in a fence post may not hurt anything (except maybe the checking account of the dumb sap who bought the thing on eBay), but try explaining the instinctual functions of the human brain to a kid terrified out of his mind by the black blob in his bedroom that looks convincingly like a bloodthirsty hell-beast.

In Lourdes, France, hundreds of thousands of sick people have foregone medical attention to instead bath in the healing light of a delusion—all because some people claimed to see miracles when they looked into the sun. (Safety tip: don’t try this at home.) And then you have people like Richard C. Hoagland, the conspiracy-spinning nutjob who swears there’s a face on Mars simply because he’s too ignorant to understand things like low-res photography and tricks of the light. Pareidolia is also responsible in part for the ‘80s Satanic cult scare—resulting in prosecutors going after children because of the evil messages they mistakenly believed they heard in backwards hair metal songs.

III. The Conclusion

Once, I thought I could make out prophecies in the lines of Robert Redford’s face. Turns out, it was just an advertisement for the Sundance Channel. Which serves me right for trying to project my hopes and dreams onto the aging epidermis of a former sex symbol. So the next time you hear of someone receiving visions through the static of their TV screen or hearing voices in the wind or seeing their dead relatives in the steam of the shower mirror, encourage them to take a deep breath and relax. All is chaos, and no one should be afraid to stare right into the void. If you squint a little, it looks just like Charles Nelson Reilly.

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About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

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