Why Are People Talking About This "Square Structure" Captured On Mars?

From time to time, Mars rovers and orbiting spacecraft send back striking images of unusual rock formations on the Red Planet.

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These discoveries range from the curious—like a donut-shaped rock that might not even originate from Mars—to the playful, such as the so-called avocado rock or a pile of stones jokingly dubbed ‘bones.’ Recently, attention turned to a newly spotted "square structure" photographed by the Mars Global Surveyor’s Orbiter Camera (MOC). After gaining traction on Reddit’s ‘aliens’ subreddit, the image drew far wider attention once Joe Rogan and Elon Musk began sharing it on X.

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So, what's going on here? As explained by the community notes on Musk's own website, the image has been altered somewhat from how it was originally captured. However, it does come from a real image taken by the orbiter, showing a square(ish) feature, assuming you fill in the connecting lines in your own head.

The entire image covers an area approximately 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) across, according to Arizona State University's Mars Image Explorer. People have, of course, speculated wildly, claiming that nature creates no such structures, and that the structure may be a buried ancient alien settlement on the Red Planet.

As fun as that would be, what we are likely looking at here are some interesting rocks. Nature, despite claims to the contrary, does throw up some interesting features and structures, from the hexagonal columns of Giant's Causeway on Earth to Saturn's polar hexagon. Geological and weather phenomena can cause plenty of familiar shapes without the need to invoke ancient aliens for an explanation. There is also likely a little of pattern recognition gone awry going on as well.

The phenomenon of seeing familiar patterns in objects where none exist is called pareidolia. In terms of our evolution, it makes sense that we spot patterns that could be a danger to us (e.g. a snake) as quickly as possible. 

Carl Sagan explained in his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, that the ability to identify threats was imperative to our survival.

Early humans who ran away from what they thought was a lion hiding in the shrub survived. Those who couldn't spot this lion "pattern" would be eaten by it. And if they ran away but it turned out that the lion was in fact just a rock, that's fine; those humans survived either way and passed on their genes.

Sagan said that finding patterns (where patterns exist or not) was a vital precautionary survival skill, but could lead to the misinterpretation of random images or patterns of light as faces and familiar objects. In this case, people are seeing a square structure in the rocks and shadows on Mars, in a photo taken in 2001.

While scientists would like nothing more than to find evidence of life on another planet, that involves ruling out all other possible natural explanations. And scientists have been caught out before, after claiming to find evidence of life on Mars, famously back in the 19th century when a few, bolstered by maps made by astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, posited that Mars had a series of canals running across the planet. 

In 1894, the public became excited by the idea too, after astronomer Percival Lowell suggested that Schiaparelli's observations showed canals that had been made by an alien civilization. Lowell ended up using a significant amount of his own money to take photographs of these "canals" in 1907, for him proving that the features were made by an alien species. 

“After the melting of the south polar cap had got well under way, canals began to make their appearance about it,” Lowell said at the time, as reported by the New York Times. “It is a direct sequitur from this that the planet is at present the abode of intelligent constructive life,” he added. 

“I may say in this connection that the theory of such life upon Mars was in no way an a priori hypothesis on my part, but deduced from the outcome of observation, and that my observations since have fully confirmed it. No other supposition is consonant with all the facts here.” 

However, others were less convinced, and the photographs he took ended up contributing to the idea being discredited. So, while it might be more fun to believe that ancient Martians left behind square structures on Mars, like the canals there is more likely a natural explanation, and a little pareidolia, going on. 

An earlier version of this article was first published in February 2025.