The infamous 'rat on Mars' has a Twitter account now.
A photo taken by NASA's Curiosity Rover back in September 28, 2012 is continuously gaining curiosity and popularity online. The so-called ‘rat on Mars' photo was actually a piece of dusty orange rock on the surface of the Red Planet but for some reason, people perceived it as a rat hiding among the stones.
The photo first came out on the website UFO Sightings Daily last December 4, 2012 which he called it a ‘Mars Rodent'. It went viral since then and various stories and hypothesis about the rat getting in the planet were made by viewers. Some say that NASA brought the poor rat outer space to test if it can survive but eventually it died and became a stone.
ScottCWaring posted in his website today an update about the photo:
"Update: A lot of people are emailing me saying that this squirrel was part of a NASA experiment to test how long it would live on the surface of Mars and I do believe this does sound like something they might do. Why would they not tell us about it? Because the squirrel would be expected to die eventually and that would get PETA to fight against them in a court of law. SCW"
Whatever they call this rock on the photo-rat, rodent, squirrel, psychology has an explanation of why people perceive random images to be an animal or an object. The experience is called pareidolia such as seeing faces on clouds, man in the moon, or hearing secret messages when a recording is reversed.
To prove that this rat is really famous, it has its own Twitter account made May 31 @RealMarsRat which earned 432 followers in less than 2 days. This rat is also active in the social networking site as it had tweeted 76 times already and interacts with its followers.
