"When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will
filter everything else out, and find the thing everywhere."
- Pi
That's one of my all-time favorite quotes. And it's quite relevant to another "Jesus sighting" that has made it to the news. This time, in a frying pan.
It seems these silly "sightings" are always coming up, and always with Abrahamic religious figures. Within the last few years there was this claim of seeing Jesus in an ultrasound photo:
And who could forget the classic Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich?
Are these miracles? No, they're examples of a known psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia. It's quite normal to "see" faces in random patterns. This is a byproduct of our keen sense of pattern-matching that we've evolved to have. And when you additionally 1) have somebody who's obsessed with a particular subject, and 2) tell somebody beforehand what they're "supposed" to be seeing, then it's inevitable that you're mind is going to project stuff like this. This is in part how Rorschach inkblot tests work. "Oh you drew a butterfly!" "No, I just dropped some ink on a page and folded it to make it symmetrical."
Here's what I personally "saw" in these items. Yes, here are picture comparisons put together by yours truly. They're just as credible as claiming to see Jesus or Mary:
Actually I got the Jane Russell idea from Michael Shermer, but I used a different photo.
