President Barack Obama’s face has appeared on Halloween masks, been compared to that of an actor portraying Satan, proposed as the fifth presidential visage on Mount Rushmore and now is being spotted by UFO enthusiasts on the surface of Mars.
It began when Scott Waring of the UFO Sightings Daily blog posted he had found a “statue” in one of the panoramic images acquired in 2005 by NASA’s Spirit Rover.
“Searching for structures on Mars I found this head. From the way it’s standing up I would say that it is a full statue, but is buried from the shoulders down,” Waring wrote.
“Sure we see scatterings of rocks, but it may just be the remains of an alien civilization that was hit hard by a competing alien race.”
Another enthusiast leapfrogged Waring’s claim, saying he had found something even more interesting.
“By cleaning the image in a software program, I discovered that this relic has an uncanny resemblance to the United States president, Barack Obama,” the poster going by the name Paranormal Crucible claimed.
The following presidential image was acquired between Oct. 1 and 3, 2005, from the summit of Husband Hill in the Columbia Hills on the Red Planet’s surface, reported the London Daily Mail:
Waring’s “discovery” is just the latest in a long line of similar finds on Mars, the result of a brain trick known as face pareidolia that causes the viewer to think he’s seeing a human face – not unlike the sightings of Jesus or the Virgin Mary in other everyday objects.
As WND reported, the similarity between Obama and the actor portraying the devil was too close to be brushed off as coincidence or a psychological mind trick.
Producers of the 20th Century Fox film, “Son of God” – a reworked version of 2013’s popular 10-hour TV miniseries titled “The Bible” – completely removed the character of Satan. His earlier appearance in the miniseries caused Twitter to explode with comments from viewers who noted the similarity – comments that then drew the focus of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck.
Co-producers Roma Downey and Mark Burnett dismissed claims the casting had been intended to suggest anything about Obama.
“This is utter nonsense,” Burnett and Downey said in a joint statement. “The actor who played Satan, Mehdi Ouzaani, is a highly acclaimed Moroccan actor. He has previously played parts in several biblical epics – including Satanic characters long before Barack Obama was elected as our president.”
While Obama’s face on a Martian rock may be illusory, if Jim Messina, architect of Obama’s campaigns and former deputy chief of staff, has his way, his old boss’s face will be memorialized in stone on Mount Rushmore.
“Oh, no question, one of the all-time great presidents,” Messina told OZY. “I think there’s no question he’s transformative,” promising decades into the future, generations will only “remember that he did a very big, historic thing.”
The Daily Mail story explained face pareidolia is a “psychological response to seeing faces and other significant and everyday items in random stimuli.” It might not be possible to be more random than Mount Rushmore, Satan and a rock on Mars.
