Forget ‘man on the moon.’ There’s a bear on Mars — and these NASA photos prove it

NASA scientists looked down at the surface of Mars and saw a bear’s face staring back at them. How did that happen?

“A Bear on Mars?” the team at NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter out of the University of Arizona’s Lunar & Planetary Laboratory asked in a Jan. 25 news release of the image, which the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) captured Dec. 12.

The feature looks just like a giant bear’s face from the right angle. And it really is giant, stretching roughly 6,560 feet —more than a mile — across, CNET reported. So what is it, really?

The team that analyzed the image explained the formation is made of a hill with a V-shaped collapse structure that looks like the nose and snout of a bear. Two craters above it look like the eyes, and a circular fracture pattern surrounding the features looks like the bear’s head.

The fracture pattern could be from deposits settling over a buried impact crater, according to the news release. The nose might be a volcanic or mud vent, and the deposit could be lava or mud flows, the release said.

“Maybe just grin and bear it,” the release said.

It isn’t the first time the HiRISE captured images of what look like faces, other symbols and creepy creatures on the surface of Mars, CNET and Insider reported.

The phenomenon of human brains finding recognizable shapes in what they see is called pareidolia, the outlets reported.

Some of the most iconic examples include the “Star Trek” logo in 2019, alien crabs and the “Face on Mars” captured in 1976 by NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft, Insider reported.

There’s also the Happy Face Crater, Beaker from “The Muppet Show,” and Ed Asner, CNET reported.

Some may also remember the “alien doorway” captured by the Curiosity Rover in 2012, Interesting Engineering reported.

NASA’s HiRISE account also shared the image on Twitter. In the comments, someone shared their version of the image they had altered to make the colors in the image look closer to those of a real bear.

“Now it looks like a bear,” they wrote.

One also put the bear’s face in the image onto a photo of an actual bear.

And of course people shared puns.

“The fact that NASA is hiding the truth about life on Mars is unbearable,” someone wrote.

“We’ll just have to face the grizzly facts,” another person replied.

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