I love us humans, and our little species-wide neural shortcuts. One example of a "shortcut" is face recognitioon. Our brains tell us what is human by looking at the face. The brain does have some flaws in this, though, because we tend to see faces where there isn't one. One of the most notable examples is the face on Mars. There is no way the "face" on the red planet was made by aliens, because as previously stated, the brain sees faces where there aren't any, the "face" is a common occurane on Mars, a mesa, and any alien proof would be seen in recent pictures. All of the evidence points towards the obvious conclusion, and the most likely scenario is probably correct, as Occam's Razor points out.

To begin, the brain tries to recognize faces, and it is really good at it. It says, "Yep, that's a face!" and that's because humans are social creatures. We need to recognize others that will be able to support us and stay together, because in ancient times, that, along with our ability to think and reason, was what we had going for us. As one source that I forget the name of stated, "Pretty much the only thing we can outsprint by bodylengths per second is vegetables." We could make tools and weapons to support ourselves, but to be effective, we had to team up. And that is why we see a "man in the moon". We see the face by craters. This is just the same thing, our brains being awesome at seeing faces, but not at recognizing the lack of a body to go with them.

Also, the "face" is a common occurance on Mars, a mesa. It is just a landform. This is shown by the NASA saying "What the picture actually shows is the Martian equivalent of a butte or mesa - landforms common around the American West." The "face" is just a landform. The most recent picture shows the mesa in much more detail, and the face starts to fade away as the resolution increases.

As stated before, the picture resolution increases with each attempt at an image, and still no alien civilization! The article states "Each pixel in the 2001 image spans 1.56 meters, compared to 43 meters per pixel in the best 1976 Viking photo." If there was above-ground alien civilization, we would have seen it by these pictures. The logical conclusion for the illogical is "What if they are underground?" and this is a valid point until you look at it more closely. To "sculpt" this landform, the aliens would have to dig out surrounding land, and that is hard, not impossible, but hard to do. And as stated before, use Occam's Razor. Also, they would most likely have to have some way to see humans, because the chances of aliens on a different planet in a different environment evolving similar faces to ours seems a little far-fetched. They would have some sort of visible, surface-bound satillite dish or something similar to recieve the signal.

Some might argue, "Well, NASA is just covering up life on Mars." and to that arguement, I say "Good job! You are so close to logic!" because while NASA could cover up the truth, they wouldn't do so. It would be good for business to discover some "sentient alien life" because the NASA budget would skyrocket! Everyone would want to know "What they look like? Do they have a language?" et cetera. Also, if they wanted to cover it up, no matter how much it would improve NASA, they have to release images publicly. If they managed to do some fancy photoshopping and release the images, there are people skilled enough to undo those photoshops and also, photoshopping leaves some computer traces around on an image, and there are plenty of free online sites that will spot those traces and show anyone where and how those touch-ups were made.

The most obvious conclusion is probably the right one, and all evidence points towards just a natural landform. The brain's ability to detect faces, the frequency of those landforms, and the ability to see alien civilization, if any exists, in more recent pictures proves the point of those who follow logic though the tinfoil-hat warriors try to say otherwise. Wait, is that a face in my soup?!