Pareidolia is common enough, and predates the space program by a millennium or two. We've all seen the Man in the Moon, or faces and images of ships and elephants in cloud formations (When I was a young reporter, I once wrote a story about a gardener who grew a green pepper that looked like Richard Nixon, but it never made the paper.)

In 1978, some 8,000 people made pilgrimages to the home of a New Mexico woman who discovered a picture of Jesus in a burned tortilla. And in 2001, thousands saw the face of Satan captured in a CNN video and Associated Press photos of smoke billowing from the World Trade Center. (For a great collection these and more example of pareidolia, visit http://thefolklorist.com).

He attributed the belief that the image is the Virgin Mary to a phenomenon called pareidolia, a psychological term for the mind's obsession with finding patterns in essentially random objects, from clouds to wood grain.

Like astrology, graphology seems to rest on the notion of "pareidolia": the human infusion of patterns or meaning on random audio or visual events. In the case of handwriting analysis, this might be the idea that writers of large capital I's are egotistical, or those having varying slants are unpredictable.