Mysterious Structure on Mars Looks Uncannily Like an Ancient Egyptian Pyramid

It would be tempting to assume there’s nothing much of note happening on Mars, but that dusty rusty planet has a lot of interesting stuff going on.

Most of it has to do with rocks. Mars has a lot of rocks. In fact, Mars has so many rocks that have undergone all sorts of weathering over the eons that, occasionally, it manages to produce something that looks a bit like an artificial or biological structure, if you squint.

It’s a bit like monkeys and typewriters. We may not get Shakespeare, but every once in a while, we might see some rocks that look enough like bugs to fool an entomologist.

The latest of these fascinating Mars illusions to hit the tabloids is an eye-catching structure, first spotted in 2002, that resembles a three-sided pyramid perched in a wind-scoured valley called Candor Chasma.

The claim appears to have gained traction after being shared on X by filmmaker Brian Cory Dobbs, who has previously promoted the idea that NASA imagery contains evidence of artificial structures on Mars.

The post quickly spread, with cropped images of the formation circulating across social media and tabloid sites.

The images themselves are real NASA data from orbiters that first photographed the region in 2001.

The earliest documented identification of the pyramid-like structure dates back to 2002, when independent researcher Wilmer Faust highlighted a strange feature he spotted in a Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) image, E06-00269.

Later claims of earlier discovery appear inconsistent over time, but one thing held firm: The so-called Candor Tetrahedron sure was interesting.

Since its discovery, other orbiters have also imaged the region, notably the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

HiRISE’s high-resolution images are striking – but, when you zoom out and look at the landscape around the tetrahedron, it starts to look less odd and more like what it is: a slightly lumpy mountain carved by the same erosional forces that shaped the chasms around it.

Candor Chasma is one of the largest canyons on Mars, shaped by water, landslides, wind, and maybe even tectonic activity over billions of years.

It’s also speckled with geological formations scientists have called “positive relief knobs“. These are previously buried rock structures that are more durable than the bedrock that once encased them; after erosion brushed the surrounding bedrock away, the knobs were left standing.

These knobs are not tiny: They can measure up to a kilometer (3,280 feet) in diameter, and up to tens of meters tall. The Candor Tetrahedron is around 290 meters in diameter, and a little taller than the typical knob at a height of 145 meters, but it still fits within this broader landscape of layered rock being sculpted into isolated hills.

It’s not dissimilar to natural pyramids on Earth, either. A mountain called Cerro Tusa in Colombia stands 457 meters above the surrounding terrain, with a base of 1.8 kilometers. China’s Guizhou province is famed for its pyramid-shaped mountains.

If you look closely at the image of the pyramid, you can see that it sits among a bed of aeolian ripples – rippling ridges carved by Mars’ wild winds, suggestive of ongoing erosion.

You can also see that the ridges on the mountain aren’t geometrically perfect as you might expect from an artificial structure, but lumpy and uneven, and the three sides are not the same size either.

Related: Curiosity Cracked Open a Rock on Mars And Revealed a Huge Surprise

Human pattern recognition is a powerful thing; we can’t help searching for meaning in meaningless data. We are particularly attuned to anything that might look like another human or a face, but geometric shapes and structures can catch our eye too.

Mars, however, doesn’t need the embellishment of pareidolia to be interesting. Its geology and weather have produced landscapes that are both starkly familiar and utterly unlike anything we can see on Earth.

And, thanks to technology like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, we can explore those landscapes in exquisite detail, imagining what it would be like to stand amid the soaring cliffs and rugged terrains of Mars, where only the wind has howled for billions of years.