Today the Huff Post Weird News section reports that a man in Glasgow, Scotland has seen the face of God (the savior, to be precise) in a bathroom door. Of an Ikea.

My last report on sightings of Our Lord and Savior was about 7 months ago, so I thought it was time for an update. Pareidolia is one of my favorite topics, as its readers may know from my my many previous posts on the subject. If you don’t know what pareidolia is, that last link (this one) covers the definition. I have also written a classroom ‘module’ for the JREF on the topic. It can be downloaded for free here (the pdf is quite large; the site is here: http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/jref-news/2208-new-jref-in-the-classroom-lessons.html).

I have a fairly extensive collection of images (under “Fun For Everyone” on the right) going back a few years, but new sightings shouldn’t be ignored and here are a few that I have missed and a few more that have appeared since my last report…

Jesus Shops at Walmart

In 2001, a couple in South Carolina found Jesus. On their Walmart receipt. One of them said, “…who else has the power to put their face on a check-out receipt but Jesus?”

It doesn’t look like Jesus to me. To me he looks like a sad Luke Danes on Gilmore girls.

Crabby Jesus

John Canfield found Mr. Crabs while on a trip with his family in Everett, Washington in 2012.

Gawker has suggested that the image looks more like Osama Bin Laden than Jesus. I have to agree, although I have never pictured Bin Laden sad, just angry. This guy looks sad. Like Jesus would be, if we are to believe the Bible.

Stingray Jesus

Also in 2012, Jesus appeared on the back of a cownose stingray. Guess it was an ocean phase.

Erika Sheldt, who photographed the creature, is catholic, but mildly skeptical. She didn’t think it was a message from God, but she noted the coincidence that Easter was around the corner.

“I just kind of thought it looked like a bearded homeless man,” Scheldt told IslandPacket.com “But when I posted pictures on Instagram, one of my friends was like, ‘That’s Jesus.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, my God. You’re right.'”

Jesus Poop

In 2013 Jesus came out of a bird and landed on the windshield of an Ohio man’s car.

Apparently, MSN thought it looked more like a dog wearing a wig. I’m not sure what to think.
 

God’s Signature

More recently, in 2014, a woman recovering from chemotherapy thinks that God was reassuring her when she found his name in the hair regrowing at the top of her head.

Cliff Jesus

And last month a tourist visiting Ireland snapped a picture of Jesus in the side of the Cliffs of Moher. Odd that nobody noticed him there before.
 

Those who read this blog in its early days know of my love for all things pareidolia. If you don’t know what pareidolia is, that last link (this one) covers the definition. I have also written an classroom ‘module’ for the JREF on the topic. It can be downloaded for free here (the pdf is quite large; the site is here: http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/jref-news/2208-new-jref-in-the-classroom-lessons.html).

I have a fairly extensive collection of images (under “Fun For Everyone” on the right), but I have not updated it in a while, so I thought it would be fun to see what people have been seeing. I was not disappointed.

Yesterday, reports of a man seeing Jesus in his chicken made the rounds. According to WNEP, Ernesto Hernandez was sitting down to dinner with his wife at their home in the Poconos (that’s in Pennsylvania) when he saw this:

Screenshot of WNEP broadcast regarding Ernesto Hernandez’s chicken

But that’s not the only recent sighting of Jesus. A few days ago there was a sighting in his mother’s arms in a tree trunk in Iowa:

Screenshot of broadcast by KCCI

Then there’s last month’s appearance in the smoke of a house fire. Well, it’s in a video capture of the smoke and the face appears just as someone in the video says “There’s someone still in the building!” while a guy carries a man out. A neighbor in an NBC News video says, “You see Jesus in the smoke and the person gets saved? That right there is not a coincidence.” Well, yeah, it is, especially when both the “see Jesus in the smoke” part and the “person gets saved” part are questionable. I actually liked what a priest in the video had to say.

But for me, the true face of God, the true image of God, was the man carrying his neighbor out on his shoulders.

For me, that’s simply a demonstration of what humans are capable of. It’s beautiful, but I don’t need God to explain it and I don’t understand why anyone would want to give God that glory when a human being deserves the praise.

And back in August, Jesus towered over HuffPo blogger Fiona Finn (btw, I have to say that I have a seriously difficult time taking seriously someone who describes herself in a byline as “keynote speaker”) in Cape Coral, Florida in cloud form:

via link to Huffington Post

SPOILER!!

Read this post first, please.

SPOILER STARTS HERE

Here’s the story…

I caught this tweet this morning:
@BadAstronomer: Beam me up some breakfast. Warp factor three egg omelette. http://twitpic.com/27mfxu

I will pretty much click on anything that starts with “beam me up”, so I did and, as you know, I saw this:

Well, I really saw this:

I even heard theme music in my head. I imagined “NCC-1701″ written on the hull in salsa. Because the original series is the cornerstone and James T. Kirk is the greatest captain of all time, space, film, and literature.

But… would I have perceived it as such if:

• the tweet did not include references to Star Trek?
• the tweet was not from Phil Plait, whom I know to be an avid fellow scifi fanatic?
• the tweet was not from Phil Plait, whom I know to be at Comic-con right now for several reasons?
• I was not lamenting not being at Comic-con myself?
• had not just rearranged a shelf on which our Original Series collection sat, taunting me?

Would Phil Plait had perceived the icon of the god that is Captain James T. Kirk if he were not at Comic-con? If he were not a sci-fi fanatic? You get the picture.

The experience of seeing the DVDs or being at (or thinking about) Comic-con is called a “prime” in the psychological literature, because it activates related information, lowering your perceptual threshold for it. The prime prepares you, in a way, to receive related input.

The tweet itself is a suggestion; it is information about to experience. You then use, in part, top-down processes to interpret the image given that information.

Some good examples of how this works using another sense (hearing) can be found in one of my first blog entries about a very naughty Elmo doll.

Priming effects sometimes confound pareidolia (the tendency to perceive familiar patterns in otherwise meaningless input). However, in laboratory tests, such as that conducted by Vokey & Read and some work a student of mine presented at the Western Psychological Association convention this year, little is perceived from very ambiguous sensory information without priming or suggestion. The “Elmo” post includes several illustrations of this.

So, the question remains: Did we see the Enterprise because it really does look like the Enterprise, or we just amazingly geeky?

Either way, I’m going to add it to my collection. If my readers are even HALF as geeky as me…

Vokey JR, & Read JD (1985). Subliminal messages. Between the devil and the media. The American psychologist, 40 (11), 1231-9 PMID: 4083611

Oirignally Posted February 4, 2009

I just caught a report on our local Fox News station about a couple that appeared on “Good Morning New York”, complaining about Elmo’s potty mouth:

Notice that the segment opens with a statement of FACT — the toy has a dirty message — rather than a question about whether this might be true.

This is a perfect example of how human perception is influenced by knowledge. Perception driven by expectation and belief is called “top-down” processing, whereas perception that starts with information from the senses is considered “bottom-up”. Most of our daily perception is top-down in nature.

In many of my classes, I demonstrate this by playing music clips backwards. Some claim that these clips have “hidden messages”. Everyone from the Beatles to Queen to Eminem to Brittany Spears has been accused of it. An entire website is devoted to the study of what David John Oates calls the greatest discovery of all time: Reverse Speech. He even sells training courses and other products (surprise, surprise).

Oates claims that our unconscious is revealing itself through our speech and that these messages can be heard if we listen to recordings of this speech backwards. He spends countless hours listening to audio recordings of politicians, celebrities, and music — listening for anything that sounds like English and documenting it. Sometimes the audio must be slowed down before one can perceive the message.

His website is the source of many of the clips that I use. Fun classroom demonstrations are the only things of value there. My personal favorite is Neil Armstrong saying, “Man will space walk” as he is walking on the moon!

Click here to listen to Neil Armstrong

Oates says, “This is a reflection of his logical thoughts at the time. Man will continue to walk into space.” However, some have claimed that this is evidence that the moon landing was a hoax; that man will walk in space someday, but he is not at the moment.

If you listen to these clips, you will probably hear it, too. So, what is going on?

The “backmasking” and “subliminal messages” paranoia that began during the early days of the cold war has been the object of many studies, all of which point to one conclusion: we do not perceive these messages unless we are told to listen for them. One of the earliest (and best) of these, by Vokey & Read, is discussed in their article in American Psychologist in 1985. The authors conducted several experiments to fully address the question, but the most interesting is the last they discuss.

They started with a recording of the 23rd Psalm because the backmasking cryers of the time claimed that Satan was the source of the messages and religious material was free of them. In addition, they chose a passage from Jabberwocky because it is meaningless when heard forward. After listening carefully they found pieces that could be interpreted as something meaningful, albeit silly. For example, part of Jabberwocky played backwards sounds something like, “Saw a girl with a weasel in her mouth.” When participants in the study were told the message to listen for, they agreed 85% of the time. However, they did not perceive that message when given a different expectation.

This effect is fairly easy to demonstrate. Try listening to the following clips for anything intelligible:

1. Queen Singing “Another One Bites the Dust”

2. The Beverly Hillbillies Theme Song

3. “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar

It’s no fun if you cheat, so listen several times and write down anything that sounds like it might be a message.

Did you get much?

THEN, click here to read the messages. Finally, listen again. It may take a time or two, but eventually you’ll hear at least some of them. Afterward, you will never perceive the jibberish you heard the first time. Instead, you will only hear the message.

In the Elmo clip, notice that one of the women on the street said, “It sounds a lot clearer this time around.” The newscaster in the studio also said that he did not hear the message, but when he played it again he did. This behavior is exactly what I would expect — and what I do expect when I play these clips for students. They never disappoint me because they are human.

Humans do not like ambiguity. We like to make sense of the world and will do so whenever we can. When told what to expect, we often form perceptions that match that expectation. Our perceptions often persist, even when we know that they were formed in this manner.

And there is the fear factor. And the outrage. And the frustration when people do not agree with you, although you believe it is obvious.

There have been many claims of evil in toyland. You might remember a few years ago, when the Teletubbies were under fire because a talking Po doll seemed to say, “Faggot, Faggot”. So, Po is a bigot even though, according to Reverend Jerry Falwell, his buddy Tinky Winky is gay.

Last year Wal-Mart pulled a doll from their shelves because of a complaint that the Doll said “Islam is the light”. Watch this ominous video about a woman who, after taking the doll away from one child, found the same message in a video game she bought for another child. Notice that the report, a broadcast from Indiana, calls it a “discovery” and does not address the question of intention or reality AT ALL.

Yes, it’s eerie that the doll and game sound the same, however, the source of the baby-talk audio may be the same. Both the doll and the game were designed to mimic a baby speaking little more than jibberish.

So, you can blame Fisher Price. You can call Elmo a pervert and conjure up a conspiracy theory. But the evidence says otherwise.

UPDATE

In December I blogged about this case of Hannah Montana’s secret plan to turn young girls into… well… you decide.