Did NASA just prove aliens exist? Some believe new Curiosity pictures show signs of life

Conspiracy theories about Mars have been around as long as humans have been able to take still images of the planet.

Websites like UFO Sighting Daily taut the possible of extraterrestrial life, purported to have "discovered" objects resembling mermaids, jelly donuts, rats, and lizards. Some "experts" even believe they found a bust of President Obama on the Red Planet, though the image they analyzed dates back to 2005.

Now comes news about an iguana-like figure alien hunters found in looking though rover pictures last week, and another that looks eerily similar to a crashed spaceship.

Crashed Star Destroyer found on Mars. (But doesn't look like it to me. You?) #mars #StarWars pic.twitter.com/3IAaN1pP4v

— Star Duel (@StarWarsJunk) August 25, 2015

When is a rock more than just a rock? When it's shaped like an iguana on #Mars, obviously: https://t.co/j6V5ZumK8m pic.twitter.com/fnqU7dVdoJ — CNN International (@cnni) August 29, 2015

"I found this anomaly in the latest Curiosity Rover photo. The black object looks like a crashed UFO," UFO Sightings Daily's Scott Waring wrote. "The craft is only about 2.5-3 meters across, so it probably only held a few passengers. Since many of the figures we found on Mars are about 5-8 cm tall, then we can conclude that his [sic] ship could carry about 20-40 passengers."

NASA immediately dashed hopes of those hoping it was an Imperial Star Destroyer, a la Star Wars. According to Ashwin Vasavada, a scientist who worked on the Mars rover project, every picture is nothing more than perfectly-placed shadows and eroded rocks.

"We have color HD cameras on this rover that far exceed anything ever sent to the planet before, and yet in order to find these things that kind of trick your brain into thinking it's a mermaid or whatever, you do have to zoom in where it's kind of a fuzzy shadow at that point," Vasavada told CNN.

Vasavada chalked this up to pareidolia, a phenomenon where the brain finds familiar objects or patters where they don't exist.

Coincidentally, NASA is prepping a six-member team aimed at finding whether Mars can sustain human life.

The crew - made up of a German physicists, a French astrobiologist, and four Americans - is in Hawaii, enclosed in a dome that prepares them for their isolating experience, which can last up to three years.