Well-known alien conspiracy theorist Scott Waring made the shocking claims about the intriguingly-shaped Mars anomaly on his etdatabase.com blog. He said: “I found this amazing side view of a face in a Mars GigaPan photo today.
“The detail is fantastic and the ear, nose, eye and forehead all have great detail to the carving.”
Apparently lying on a sand-strewn hill, the object’s dimensions do appear to approximate a humanoid head.
The sandy-coloured shape has a tapered tip, resembling a chin.
A prominently jutting section towards the top could easily be mistaken for a forehead.
READ MORE: ‘UFO city’ spotted on Google Moon map
The image’s metadata indicates the object was photographed on November 23, 2015, by NASA’s Mars Opportunity Rover.
The self-proclaimed UFO researcher believes he is performing an important service by searching for faces among the Red Planet’s rubble.
Mr Waring said: “It shows us who they were, what they looked like, who they admired, if there are males and females of the species and much more.
“Discovering life elsewhere in the universe would answer the deepest most complex unanswered question of science.
“One carving in stone of an alien face solves this greatest question of science.
“As Saint Magnus Albertus states: ‘Do there exist many worlds, or is there but a single world?
“’This is one of the most noble and exalted questions in the study of Nature.’”
The discoveries of “faces” on Mars is nothing new.
In 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft was scouting out a potential Mars landing site for its sister spacecraft, Viking 2, when it came across something unexpected.
While the spacecraft was acquiring pictures of a region of the planet called Cydonia, Viking 1 captured what looked like an enormous human face staring up at it.
The “face” measured nearly two miles across and had what looked like deep-set eyes and a clearly delineated nose and mouth.
The media was quick to sensationalise the image, describing it real evidence of life on Mars.
Despite the apparent clarity of the “face”, NASA was quick to explain away the image as nothing more than an optical illusion.
Shadows caused by the angle of the sun were merely creating the illusion of eyes, a nose and mouth across a natural formation, according to scientists.
The bizarre mind trick is known as the pareidolia effect.
NASA said: “Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon where people see recognizable shapes in clouds, rock formations, or otherwise unrelated objects or data.
“There are many examples of this phenomenon on Earth and in space.”