This is another aerial photograph, a nadir view, of the Silver Lake dunes in Michigan, taken at about 200 ft (61m) AGL. I admit I didn’t see the shape of a human head when I first saw it from the air, but there was certainly enough intrigue about these patterns in the sand to make me want to photograph it. Later in development, I began to flip and rotate the image around to see what orientation I liked the most. And when I made the image vertical, I saw the Dune Man.

For those who don’t know, this tendency to see faces in various patterns or even the shape of animals in the clouds is called pareidolia. The word’s origins mention a translation of the German word “pareidolie” from an 1866 paper by German psychiatrist Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum titled “On Delusion of the Senses.” He describes it as a secondary perception or side image perception. Our brains are evolutionarily wired to seek out recognizable patterns which contributed to our survival in the wild by recognizing friends or a lion in the grass.

The very definition of a delusion involves believing things that aren’t really there. Some people who experience pareidolia do take it to those levels, especially in seeing religious figures or symbols, which unfortuantely also opens them up to scam artists seeking to exploit it. To be clear, I do not see any particular human, just a human head and neck with an upward tilt and gaze.

It’s possible nobody else sees Dune Man here. I am ok with that. But the very fact I stated it perhaps imposes some confirmation bias on someone else because they will intentionally look for a human form vs. just seeing it serendipitously. I know the sand did not intentionally carve the shape of a human head in the landscape – or wait, did it? Did the dune know I was looking at it and it communicated a mirror image back at me gazing up at the drone? Am I trying to convince myself that I am not truly delusional? Wait … isn’t there something about pareidolia and schizophrenia?!!