Uncanny Valley

Ok, I had resisted doing this for a while because I couldn’t find much solid evidence about this, but after looking again and again for the past few weeks and still not finding much, I need to make this page to hopefully attract some answers. It really bugs me how the Interweb can be a kilometer wide and a millimeter deep sometimes.

So first look at this image from google maps. Now I do not care if you think it looks more like Jim Morrison or some other hippy rather than Jesus, I really don’t. Posting a “No, it looks like…” comment is now officially like posting a ‘me too’ comment, but more annoying.

Now this is not a trick of the shadows of the clouds or whatnot, because there are no clouds. Google did not plant it either, because the same picture is on terraserver. So that means either EarthSat or the Department of Defense created this or it really exists. The DoD has fudged satellite images before (look at the roof of the White House) but this is in Peru, so I don’t think it’s that likely.

If this thing is real, it’s a bit more than four square kilometers. That’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility to be artificial, but the detail looks a bit difficult. It could be natural, as much as any other religious image found anywhere. If I were to wager at this point I’d say it would be human-made. There is one guy who agrees as well, but he doesn’t really provide much evidence to back it up.

But now we have a tentative name for this thing: “Perfil de Jesucristo” Maybe that’s what it’s really called, or maybe it’s just something else that that guy found and thought sounded good. That page says it’s near the town of Arequipa, which Mapquest can back up. The poster indicates that the formation is artificial, but the page cited does not support this. Also we have no other pictures to support that both Google and Peru4u are talking about the same thing. Sometimes it bugs me that noone else is a visual person.

So I have to so some googling. If one searched just for ‘Perfil de Jesucristo’ you get a lot of user profiles for people who’s handles are ‘Jesucristo.’ If you add ‘Peru’ you get more what you need, but if you add ‘-rioja’ to weed out the Argentine sights then you only get that one page on Peru4u and lots of blog posts. Hmmm…..

If I look for ‘Perfil de Cristo’ I see something indicating it is naturally-formed. But again, this isn’t much and this page doesn’t show any amazing faces in the rocks. How can there only be two pages on this huge image on the face (pun intended) of the planet? Maybe this formation isn’t really called the Perfil de (Jesu)cristo. Who knows. Maybe one of you can help? More brownie points given for actual pictures. I know this it too weird to just be pareidolia.

Image courtesy of Terraserver.com