I’m pretty good at this stuff — lots of practice — but I don’t see anything like a face that could be taken as Jesus, God, or even anything human. I see several different cartoon faces, but that’s probably not what the churchgoers think they see. I might see a cartoon samurai holding his breath, or maybe the Face of Boe, but that’s it.
This siliness will never end.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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June 18th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
It looks more like a dragen or a devil – like something evil. But never like jesus or god!
Jesus, Human imagination!
June 18th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Hey Jesus! Is that a chandelier in your pocket, or are you just really happy to see me?
June 18th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Did you see that the church is located “near 6th and Looney?”
Nuff said.
June 18th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
I can almost, almost see a very angry cat.
June 18th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Does it whisper “You are not alone…“?
June 18th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
I see a Dog……
June 18th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
I kind of see god from monty python. The one they used in the holy grail… But I really have to try, and it was only in the first picture in the article. Maybe we don’t see it because we’re too skeptical.
June 18th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
I see it! I see it! A ceiling tile!
June 18th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
That sums it up. “6th and Looney.”
My favorite is the quotes from the blind… I mean “faithful”
“It really speaks for itself, you know?” Lowery said. “It’s not from here, because you’ve never seen anything on Earth like it.”
As for why the face can’t be seen without a camera…that may be the biggest mystery of all.
I’ve seen a LOT of things just like it on Earth. I call them clouds. And since a digital camera lens can pick up light in infrared wavelengths invisible to the human eye, I’d say Mystery solved.
Maybe we don’t see it because we use our brains.
June 18th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
I sent the following email to the reporter, Ben Watson:
—-
The emperor has no clothes! Seriously there is nothing there to see. Any face these people are imagining they are seeing is due to the well documented phenomenon of Pareidolia.
I think you should do a follow up piece to this report – a report on the phenomenon of Pareidolia. For balance.
Thanks!
—-
BTW Ben Watson’s email address is:
bwatson@wmctv.com
Let’s ALL send him some email!
June 18th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
…what the heck. I don’t see anything either, and I’m known for having lots of imagination.
June 18th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
I got news for them… I can’t see the face WITH the camera, either.
June 18th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
It’s obviously Xenu!
June 18th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
It’s sort of funny. If I don’t really look at the picture, I can sort of see the face of Jesus, as it is usually portrayed. The narrow jaw, dirty blond beard, and tranquil face of a “sacred heart” painting seems to sit upside down in the photograph until I actually look at it.
Then I see a trilobite, or a Ferengi Marauder (also upside down)
June 18th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
I can usually see these things even if they are upside down. Rotate the picture 180º and you should be able to see the image of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, hallelujah! (As he was envisioned by medieval artists.)
June 18th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
I give up. What’s it supposed to be, again?
June 18th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Yes! The Face of Boe!! He lives!!!
June 18th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Face of Boe was the first thing I thought when I saw the picture. Okay, the second, after “water damage?” I’m a little paranoid because of some water that’s dripped through to the first floor ceiling of my condo.
June 18th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
turn the pic upside down
June 18th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Well, I’ve been primed by the visist to Pharyngulam but to me it looks like the underside of a spidercrab.
June 18th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
I was going to refer to the
“his church, located near 6th and Looney”
reference in the article, but I see that at least 2 people have been there a’fore me – still, it’s dang funny, and all too appropriate.
But, guys, it can’t be the Face of Boe, there is none of Boe’s time-worn wisdom in that mirage, oops VISION.
June 18th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
I really couldn’t see the face. Looks like a water stain to me. Oh wait! Hey it’s Yoda! I wonder if different cameras take a consistant picture. I wonder if the pics are just from one camera phone or a couple different ones.
June 18th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
About the only thing I can see if I really, really squint is Chucky with a punk haircut.
June 18th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
Of course, a much clearer religious image can be found here:
http://www.susankdailey.com/images/Giclee_Mount%20of%20the%20Holy%20C_L.jpg
But that’s in Colorado, a little too far from 6th and Looney St….
But wait! BA is in Colorado…
June 18th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
It kinda looks like one of those bizarre fish that are only found on the sea floor… Or a guy with his head stuffed in a plastic grocery sack…
June 18th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
It actually looks like a floating flame… I’ve seen it in some movie, but I honestly can’t remember which one right now.
No, wait…. it’s His Noodlyness, the Flying Spaghetti Monster Himself! How fortunate those worshipers are, that they have been visited by the FSM…
June 18th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
Looks like some kind of weird rabbit with a pig snout. Or if lean my head to the right, a cat with the light mounting as it’s nose (cat mouth is very prominent). Or a pufferfish. Or if I focus on the top streak, I can get an Excalibur sword going. Can’t see anything resembling a person either.
June 18th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
That would be “as its nose.” BTW, what does god look like?
June 18th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Looks to me *exactly* like an arm holding a cell phone.
June 18th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
I (I have no brother) see Yoda, personally.
June 18th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
“all of a sudden a big bang hit the church…The lights on the inside went to solid gold”
Sounds like they had a transformer blow up on them and the voltage drop about in half. If they were on a 3-phase and they lost one side, the lights would dim to “solid amber.”
- Jack
June 18th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
It’s the Master! Run, Doctor, run!
June 18th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Melusine,
I think God looks like whatever stain you find around your house/church/pizza pan/driveway/etc.
Unless it’s a shower curtain; then it looks like Lenin
June 18th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
“I was preaching on ‘God Knows Where We Are,’ and all of a sudden a big bang hit the church,” he said.
There was a big bang… then there was god.
June 18th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Well I was once at an outdoor performance of Macbeth and just as they get to
the bit about lights and portents in the sky a low flying jet comes over and they
have to wait for it to fly past before they continue. _And_ it was in _Boulder_. What are the odds?
June 19th, 2007 at 3:38 am
I see it now. To help those of you who find it hard to make out, I’ve outlined it in this image:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v471/dcowan38/board_posts/godincamera.gif
June 19th, 2007 at 5:36 am
Old School Cylon. Definitely.
June 19th, 2007 at 6:50 am
Looks like one of those samurai crabs to me. Why couldn’t the ghost of an ancient warrior reincarnated as a crab show up in a church? At least I’ve seen evidence for the existence of samurai and crabs.
June 19th, 2007 at 7:13 am
Well it looks like a rather dull church tbh, i’m not all that surprised they have started hallucinating.
Defiantly looks more manga-esque than biblical to me.
June 19th, 2007 at 7:35 am
I rotated it 180 degrees and the first thing I saw was a lion roaring at me. I think it’s a female, but maybe it’s an adolescent whose mane hasn’t fully grown yet. There’s one prominent eye to the right of bracket holding the light to the ceiling, and I can imagine another eye on the other side. The mouth is below the bracket (the big dark spot), and the chin is below that. The ears are to the upper-left and upper-right and it’s a lion. (Remember this is all rotated 180 degrees from the original.)
Next, I can see the face of Boe. I didn’t actually know who Boe was, then I clicked the wiki link and it was him! He’s looking left (same rotated view as the lion) and uses the same eye as the lion. There’s a dark spot for his scalp and another for his mouth, then a light spot for an ear (but it looks like Boe doesn’t have an ear, so I must be seeing things).
If I rotate it 90 or 270 degrees from original, I see a cloud with sunrays, but the image is sideways. But I don’t see that when I rotate it so the cloud is upright (180 from original). Guess the lion is just to obvious.
And shouldn’t *any* picture be the physical manifestation of the face of God? That’s how I always learned it back in Sunday school.
And I’m with you (Jack Hagerty) on the transformer thing. As I was reading the description it sounded very familiar, and when I read your comment it all came back to me; that same thing happened at the Methodist church back home when I was in Boy Scouts (the church hosted the scout troop, and we used a couple of the church buildings for our Scout stuff).
June 19th, 2007 at 8:30 am
Definitely a bowl of pasta. All hail FSM!
June 19th, 2007 at 8:44 am
It doesn’t look like a darn thing to me. Some people’s imaginations…
June 19th, 2007 at 9:12 am
Sergeant Zim, I looked at that picture and the first thing I saw was a chocobo and a raven. Then I saw the cross. Lol.
June 19th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Gee, I thought it looked like Jerry Garcia, playing his guitar upside down. See, I told Y’All, JERRY LIVES,,,
I guess this is one reason the Moslems don’t allow pictures of any critters. Too much likelihood of people seeing crap like this and thinking it’s significant.
Gary 7
June 19th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
I see a flying pig! So pigs can fly, eh?
June 19th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Methinks ’tis like a weasel…
(Google that phrase)
June 19th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
I see a face – but it looks kinda like Jim Carey as the Grinch. Actually, now that I think about it “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh” whereas the “Grinch taketh and the Grinch giveth”…
June 19th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Well, this’ll make people lose respect for me…
I’ve had it. I’ve tried over the years to be tolerant if not accepting of religion, and have myself not been able to consider myself an athiest, because I just can’t definitively know, but screw all that now. Screw religion, and all the insanity it has bestowed upon our world. We are all doomed as long as people continue to believe in nonsense like this. A more cynical person would say we deserve to be doomed for holding such beliefs, but I don’t believe in punishing everyone for the errors of a few.
(Yeah, I know, you’re going to say that I’m punishing all religious believers for the actions of these people, so that makes me a hypocrite in your eyes. But I haven’t gone out and harmed or killed people in the name of anything, nor am I advocating any such action now, even against these poeple whom I can’t stand. I just wish religion was a relic of the past, so that we could collectively have a future.)
June 19th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
…assuming they had any respect for me to begin with, of course. (Might be a big assumption on my part.)
June 19th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
I saw Vigo the Carpathian: “death is but a doorway; time is but a window—I’ll be back.”
After looking at this thing for a while I woke up covered in slime dazed and confused.
June 19th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
Looks kind of like a Cambrian Trilobite .
June 19th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
And yes, I know I misspelled atheist. Darned lack of a preview function coupled with my hurried typing. Sigh…
June 20th, 2007 at 9:40 am
The first thing I saw was the Bounty Hunter Zuckus from Star Wars.
June 20th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Try standing all the way across the room. That way, I see the Jesus-on-the-cross, kind of droopy, sad face you see in traditional art.
In the cell phone pic, all I see is a disgusted cat.
June 21st, 2007 at 1:57 pm
It is Vigo!
Great Ghostbusters reference. You need to do the whole fade thing with a picture of Vigo the Carpathian and this thing.
June 26th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Hey, I know that guy, and I bet Wheaton does too!
It’s the Crystaline Entity.
RUN!!!