A Reddit user believes they’ve found a face peering back at them in a Google Earth image from Antarctica. The satellite picture shared on the r/strangeearth page shows what appears to be a half closed eye, a nose and a grimacing mouth in the snow and ice. Several on Reddit were quick to liken it to Megatron, the main antagonist from the popular Transformers franchise. You can find it for yourself by entering the coordinates 72°00’52″S 168°35’37″E.

It’s not the first time Antarctica has sparked intrigue by findings on Google Earth.Users think they’ve found a massive door while some believe there is an ‘alien pyramid’ half-buried in the snow. The face posted on Reddit, it turns out, has actually been shared on the same site previously, in 2019. A UFO enthusiast suggested it could be evidence of aliens visiting earth, while conspiracy theorists believed it to be relics of an ancient civilisation.

Blake Cousins, of YouTube channel thirdphaseofmoon, said: ‘It appears to be a massive, ancient structure of some kind of face that is being revealed for the first time on Google Earth. ‘I would have to concur that whatever we’re looking at resembles some sort of megastructure.’. But several posting on Reddit believe it’s just a natural formation created by snow and ice, with some simply commenting ‘pareidolia.’.

Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon that causes the brain to see an object, patterns or meaning where there is none. It’s particularly common for people to see faces and bodies and there are several theories as to why. Metro’s on Whatsapp! Join our community for breaking news and juicy stories. Adam Waytz, a professor and psychologist at Northwestern University in Illinois, has spent years studying the possible reasons behind anthropomorphism, has it’s called.

Speaking to the Metro last year, he partly put it down to the fact that the ‘self is so accessible for us and the self represents the prototypical human’. Also, he said we need to make sense of the world or of an object and often do this by ‘treating it as something we are familiar with – a human.’. A third reason, he explained, is that ‘when we are deprived of social connection from humans we will seek it in other sources, including nonhumans’.

Meanwhile, Punit Shah, a psychologist at the University of Bath, said our brains have evolved over many years to ‘process visual information that is most useful to our survival’. ‘Social information, like faces, is extremely important for successfully existing and thriving in social groups – which is exactly what we as humans need to do,’ she added. Among some of the most bizarre anthropomorphism finds we’ve reported on over the years was Freddie Mercury on a teaspoon and singer Lewis Capaldi in some chip wrapping.

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