Twenty five years ago something funny happened around Mars. NASA's Viking 1 spacecraft was circling the planet snapping pictures of possible landing sites for Viking 2, then it spotted a shadowy likeness of a human face. An enormous head nearly two miles from end to end. It seemed to be staring back at the cameras on Viking 1. These photos were taken from the region of the Red Planet called Cydonia.

Viking 1 took a picture of something call a butte or mesa. They're most common in the American West. It's a lava dome that takes the form of an isolated mesa about the same height as the Face on mars. Their is one in the Snake RIver Plain in Idaho.

On April 5, 1998, when Mars Global Surveyor flew over Cydonia for the first time, Michael Malin and his Mars Orbiter Camera team snapped a picture ten times sharper than the original Viking photos.

"As a rule of thumb, you can discern things in a digital image 3 rimes larger than the pixel size. If there were objects in this picture like airplanes on the ground or Egyptian-style pyramids or even small shacks, you could see what they were!" said Jim Garvin.

The picture actually shows is the Martian Equivalent of a butte or mesa. This landform is most common in the American west. "It reminds me most of the MIddle Butte in the Snake River Plain of Idaho," says Jim Garvin.