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No. 36: Here's looking at you, kid!

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Here's looking at you, kid!

First | Previous | 2015-09-30 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/pomh/?comic=36

Strip by: Ian Boreham

{A group of soldiers have arrived at a farm. They have tools, and are busy trying to eradicate faces that can be seen everywhere in nature and man-made objects in the scene - the windows and door of the farmhouse, a face on a rock, a twisted old tree, etc. The squad captain is talking to the farmer. The soldiers' truck is in the foreground, bearing a logo of a crossed-out smiley face and the letters PRS.}

caption: Pareidolia Response Squad

Captain: Looks like we made it just in time.

{One of the soldiers is looking at the front of the truck, and has leapt back in shock at seeing, apparently for the first time, the face formed by the headlights and radiator grille.}

Soldier: Captaaain!

The author writes:

It's glaringly obvious that the pareidolia problem is getting out of hand, and we'll have to face up to it soon. We can no longer countenance this situation.

Cases of pareidolia have a number of recognisable features that suggest that traditional figures such as the Green Man may just be pareidolia in another guise. What we need is for scientists to profile the phenomenon so we can have some semblance of understanding of the problem.

Of course, space travel has made things worse. Early Mars probes inadvertently contaminated the red planet with pareidolic particles from Earth. The first sign of this was the "Face on Mars", and now it seems every image sent back by probes and rovers has more faces. We are being watched from the timeless worlds of space, but it's our fault! The recent Pluto fly-by showed an apparent large heart. I envisage that next time we get close-up photos of Pluto, we'll see a large smiley face.

Drawn in Krita and Inkscape.