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The human brain is a remarkable pattern recognition machine with a keen penchant for extracting meaning from noise.

This, of course, will turn out to be nothing more than an unremarkable optical illusion; an urban legend is born.




That doesn't seem likely, since there's images from a second camera of a stereo pair. The suggestion that it's a fulgerite or offthrow of the landing seem the likliest explanations to me.


This is called Pareidolia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia).

> Pareidolia ... is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant.


When you're driving in a snow storm (sometimes unavoidable) one of the hardest things is to maintain a feeling of heading and not to respond to every impulse when your brain thinks it has made meaning out of the falling snow just ahead of the car. And even harder to realize when it actually has picked up something of significance.

I got caught in snow storms several times and what surprised me was how much physical effort it takes to do this for any length of time.




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