Faces, bones and a black knight: what do NASA's old photos hide?
A Mexican news site, Diario Amanecer, has compiled the NASA images that UFO researchers and enthusiasts have for decades regarded as evidence of extraterrestrial life or artificial structures. Most of the cases have a scientific explanation, but for a few, the image's resolution or size makes it impossible to determine with certainty what it shows.
The best-known item on the list is the 1976 Viking 1 probe image of the Cydonia region, in which shadows and low resolution produced a shape resembling a face. Later, sharper images showed an eroded mesa, yet the “Face on Mars” has remained one of the most frequently cited alleged extraterrestrial traces to this day. A similar fate befell an image taken by the Curiosity rover in May 2022, which showed an angular opening about 30 centimeters across in a rock face: some interpretations took it to be the entrance to an underground base, while NASA identified it as a fracture that forms naturally in the rock.
For several images, the explanation is a simple optical illusion. According to the mission team, the rock photographed by Curiosity that resembles a thigh bone is the result of wind or water erosion, and the tiny humanlike shape appearing in a Spirit rover panorama cannot, due to the image's low resolution, be identified as anything other than an irregular rock, although enthusiasts continue to call it the “Martian woman.” Likewise, another Spirit image showed a silhouette resembling a dark, furry creature, which an analysis of the scale found to be too small to be a living being.
Missions beyond Earth orbit also supplied material for the theories. During the STS-88 space shuttle mission, a dark, irregular object was photographed near Endeavour, which was later linked to the legend of the “Black Knight,” an alleged alien satellite said to have been orbiting the Earth for thousands of years. According to the most widespread explanation, it was a thermal blanket that came loose during construction of the International Space Station, and the mission's documentation recorded several similar pieces of debris around the shuttle. The bright, oval object seen moving around the Moon in an Apollo 16 image was later identified as one of the lunar module's exterior lights, captured by the camera from an unusual angle.
There is also a case where the mystery did remain unsolved for a while. In January 2014, the Opportunity rover photographed a white rock with a reddish center that had appeared in a spot where there had been nothing four days earlier; the sudden appearance prompted speculation for a time about an organism or an unknown material. The investigation ultimately found that one of the rover's wheels had broken off a rock, and one of the pieces had landed on that spot.
According to NASA, the most likely explanation for the tiny flashes of light detected by Curiosity is cosmic rays striking the sensor, sunlight reflections or a faulty pixel, although UFO-believing followers of the phenomenon suspect moving objects. For the small rock formations resembling fingers and a fossilized flower, the scientific explanation is mineral deposition and erosion, while because of the size and resolution of the images, doubt cannot be entirely ruled out for these either, which keeps the speculation alive.
The sober take
So far, NASA has not found convincing evidence in any case that the images in question are connected to extraterrestrial life or artificial structures; most of the phenomena are explained by erosion, debris, light refraction or the technical characteristics of the camera, but because of the low resolution of some images, it cannot be determined with complete certainty what they show.