Does Desperation Drive Enthusiast's Sightings on Mars?

[GoldenRivet]

http://www.cnet.com/news/fish-shaped...tag=YHF65cbda0

Enthusiasts pour through image after image of the red planet's surface sent back from the mars rover, and in almost every frame, viewers from around the globe claim to have spotted everything from a face, to a person in a robe... from a rat to machine parts and now a fish.

But what fuels this frenzy of sightings? Is it just common people with limited scientific knowledge and information experiencing pareidolia, the phenomenon of humans looking for recognizable patterns in random chaos? or is it just sheer desperation for answers in the quest to once and for all prove that anything living exists outside the confines of our planet?

Personally, having taught many pilots about the various illusions their eyes and mind can experience and multitude of lies their bodies can tell, i remain skeptical of virtually anything that is sighted on the martian surface as virtually all of it - short of E.T. blatantly tapping on the camera lens - can be explained by some sort of geological or meteorological science.

I do however believe that there is a strong possibility that some sort of life does exist on mars, and in fact, on most other planets in our solar system. Albeit microscopic in nature, and difficult to find, i believe it is there nonetheless... probably residing in the soil, or in some subterranean thermal vent of some sort, deeper than the rover is able to access.