Where is this alleged image without the concretion?

I’m pretty familiar with the topography of that area. I’ve been following the rover’s images fairly closely, since they landed. Those rocks are small, the layers are very thin. That is a typical concretion for that specific area on top of the Columbia Hills.

There are some very curious impressions in some of the rocks in that area (not this image) that look very much like fossils, but this isn’t one of them.

And yes, we have before and after images of a water outburst in a gully in the southern hemisphere, but that isn’t going to produce an underground, interstitial concretion and then have the surrounding rock away in the wind in anywhere near such a short period of time.

I think this photo illustrates very well how a blobsquatch can come about. Obviously this is something other than a sasquatch that nevertheless appears to be very humanoid in shape and to me this begs the question of how often this happens in alleged photos of sasquatch taken here on Earth. I believe our brains are more or less wired to try and find patterns in things, to make sense out of chaos, and to find something with which to relate what we see. This can cause random rock formations, tree stumps, branches, and what not, to take on more familiar patterns such as humanoid shapes. If you really look hard at an array of spots, for example, and want to see something in all the randomness, it will likely appear to you.

I may catch some flak from believers that may be here, but in my humble opinion the very same thing happened with the so called “Face of Mars” photo. There was a peculiar rock formation shaped by wind or geological forces, and the human brain takes that and fills in the blanks, seeing something familiar to us which in this case is a face. I’ve read of all the “evidence” in favor of this being something intelligently made, and some of it really seems plausible on the surface. But looking behind the curtain, beyond the smoke and mirrors, to me most of it is again someone looking for patterns in the randomness and chaos, taking their interpretations of data and fitting that into their hypothesis.

This cool little photo shows how something so inanimate and remote can become a humanoid shape when we view it. I absolutely think this sort of thing sometimes plays a role in what we see, or think we see, in alleged sasquatch photos.

So what seems like a response to his comment, it’s not. Just a coincidence. Or was it?

Talk about pareidolia! And where does Bigfoot figure in this? Are we at the point where ANY unidentifiable random collection of line, color and tone will automatically be labeled Bigfoot?

C’mon, Cryptomundians, let’s get serious!

I’ll try to answer your question about the desert. I’m not an expert on deserts but I’ve been in arid parts of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico in the desert, plains and foothills. While many of these areas are similar in appearance to the Mars landscape, you do find plants like creosote bushes, yucca, mesquite, and (ouch) cholla and other kinds of cactus.

Vegetation may be very sparse in the deserts but you always find plants tucked away here and there even in the most desolate spots. When it rains in the spring, the desert plants have incredible blooms and flowers. If these pictures were in Arizona or New Mexico, you would see evidence of some vegetation somewhere. At least the places I have been in were not entirely barren. Someone who lives in those areas may have better details.

The figure is a rock, but it is a really neat photo. PhotoExperts analysis is spot on. If you could actually pick it up or even look at it from a different angle, it wouldn’t look like a humanoid figure. Erosion can do funny things and the minerals in rocks will determine how they react to erosion. I’ve picked up rocks out of creeks that when you turned them certain ways, you could imagine they looked like faces, animals or arrow points - but alas they are just eroded rocks. Mars probably once had water erosion but now it experiences only wind erosion.

If there is life on Mars, it will be very different in form. Odds are against a humanoid form in that environment. Actually, we have probably introduced an invasive species to Mars - Microbes that would have hitchhiked on the Spirit. Microbes are everywhere and some could survive in airless cold environments like space.