Pareidolia, as this experience is known, is by no means a recent phenomenon. Leonardo da Vinci described seeing characters in natural markings on stone walls, which he believed could help inspire his artworks. In the 1950s, the Bank of Canada had to withdraw a series of banknotes because a grinning devil leapt from the random curls of the Queen’s hair (although I can’t, for the life of me, see the merest hint of a horn in Her Majesty’s locks). The Viking I spacecraft, meanwhile, appeared to photograph a carved face in the rocky landscape of Mars.
