Oddly Enough: The Connection Between a 10-year Old Sandwich and The Man on the Moon

Why the brain finds meaning in the random and Jesus shows up in a Cheeto

Have you ever looked up at the moon and seen a face looking back? Or spotted an animal in the clouds, a smile in a wall outlet, or a mysterious figure in the burn marks on a tortilla? That strange little experience has a name: pareidolia. It is the psychological tendency to see familiar shapes, faces, patterns, or meaningful images in random or unclear things. It is also completely normal. In fact, it may be one of the brain’s oldest survival tricks.

Human brains are very good at finding faces. That makes sense. For most of human history, quickly spotting another person, reading an expression, or noticing a possible threat could be the difference between safety and danger. The result is that our brains sometimes work a little too well. They connect dots, shadows, stains, clouds, rocks, toast marks, and moon craters into something familiar. The “Man in the Moon” is one of the most famous examples. The face many people see is not really a face at all, but a combination of dark ancient lava plains, called lunar maria, and lighter lunar highlands. Still, once your brain turns those patches into eyes, a nose, and a mouth, it can be hard to unsee. Cultures around the world have seen many different things in the moon. Some see a man, while others see a woman, a boy carrying sticks, a rabbit, or even a toad. And because the moon is viewed from different parts of the world at different angles, not everyone is staring at the same “face.” The next full moon visible in Brackettville is expected to be the Micro Full Moon on June 29, 2026, reaching full illumination at 6:56 p.m. Central Time. So look up and see what your brain finds. It may be a man. It may be something else entirely.

Pareidolia is not limited to the sky. People see faces in tree bark, cars, rock formations, electrical outlets, coffee foam, and, of course, food. One of the most famous food-based examples was a grilled cheese sandwich said to bear the likeness of the Virgin Mary. In 2004, the 10-year-old, half-eaten sandwich sold on eBay for $28,000. The Florida woman who made it said she noticed the image after taking a bite in 1994 and kept the sandwich for years. How that sandwich wasn’t covered in mold 10 years later seems like a miracle in and of itself, but I digress. There’s actually a listing on eBay right now for a “RARE Flamming Hot Cheeto Shaped like mother Mary and baby Jesus! **very rare****” priced at $999.99 or best offer. Don’t worry, for that price the seller states that it will be shipped in protective package to ensure safe delivery!

Long before internet-famous sandwiches and e-bay cheetos, pareidolia interested artists, scientists, and psychologists. Leonardo da Vinci wrote that artists could look at stained walls, mixed stones, or random marks and imagine landscapes, battles, faces, figures, and whole scenes. To him, the ability to find images in randomness was connected to creativity. Psychiatry later took a more complicated view. In some periods, pareidolia was treated negatively and was even associated with symptoms of psychosis or dementia. By the late 1800s and early 1900s, psychologists began using random images to study imagination and perception. French psychologist Alfred Binet suggested inkblots could help study “involuntary imagination,” and Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach developed the famous Rorschach test, which asked people what they saw in abstract inkblot images. Today, we know pareidolia is not automatically a sign that something is wrong. It is usually just the brain doing what the brain does: searching for meaning.

That may be the most oddly enough part of all. The universe gives us randomness. Clouds drift. Toast burns unevenly. Lava plains darken the moon. Tortillas bubble on the skillet. Then the human mind steps in and says, “Wait a minute. I see something.” And maybe that is why randomness is so fascinating. Shuffle a deck of cards, scatter stars across a sky, or arrange atoms in the universe, and the possible combinations become almost impossible to imagine. Yet we still look for patterns. We still find stories. We still see faces.

One of our favorite opportunities for pareidolia is tortillas. So if you have read this far, don’t be surprised if you suddenly spot a face on your next taco. That would be the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, another interesting brain-thing, also called the frequency illusion: once you learn about something, you start noticing it everywhere. The faces were probably always there. Your brain just got invited to the party.

Check out the Cheeto on eBay HERE
Let us know what random thing you've seen recently! Email photos and stories to editor@kinneycountypost.com