Is That a Rodent on Mars? Yes, Say Some Observers

Call it the case of the Red Planet rodent.

A photo taken by the Mast Camera on the National Aeronautical and Space Administration's Curiosity Mars rover appears to feature a rock-strewn, dusty, orange Martian surface --- and a dusty, orange rodent peering out from among the stones, space enthusiasts claim.

The Mast Camera, or Mastcam, takes color still images and video footage of the Martian terrain, which can then be fitted together to create panoramas of the rust-hued landscape around the rover.

Snapped Sept. 28, 2012, the image depicts the site, where NASA's rover took a scoopful of sand, tested it, and deemed it weathered basaltic materials - similar to the pyroclastic materials found on Hawaii, the space agency said last year.

The "creature" was identified on the UFO Sightings Daily website, where the rodent revealer, Scott C. Waring, was apparently convinced of his cosmic critter discovery.

"Note its lighter color upper and lower eyelids, its nose and cheek areas, its ear, its front leg and stomach. Looks similar to a squirrel camouflaged in the stones and sand by its colors," Waring wrote on the sight. "Hey, who doesn't love squirrels, right?"

A later entry on the UFO Sightings sight offered another possible twist to the story: that the spotted animal is in fact an Earth squirrel set free in the less-hospitable Mars environment by NASA researchers themselves.

"A lot of people are emailing me saying that this squirrel was part of a NASA experiment to test  how long it would live on the surface of Mars and I do believe this does sound like something they might do," Waring again posted on the sight. "Why would they not tell us about it? Because the squirrel would be expected to die eventually and that would get PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] to fight against them in a court of law."

Other observers examining the image noted the similarity with actual rocks in coloring and position showed the assumed astro-animal was most likely just another rock.

The biggest culprit in the red rat scenario appears to be the psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia, a propensity to pick out faces from inanimate objects and structures.

In fact, designers at the Onformative studio in Berlin, Germany, developed an algorithm that scans the surface of the earth with Google Maps and picks out geographical structures that could be construed by human eyes as having face-like features, according to a report by iO9.

The Onformative algorithm has indeed found faces in fields, mustaches in mountains and eyes in hills across the surface of the earth.