The doctors at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, were reviewing an ultrasound of a 45-year-old patient with severe testicular pain when something brought them to an abrupt halt.
There was a face on the screen. A male outline looking upward, mouth open, as if the poor fellow were suffering too. Urologists Gregory Roberts and Touma Naji later described it in the journal Urology, comparing it to those faces of saints that appear on toast or in a grilled cheese sandwich. It’s an example of pareidolia, the phenomenon that makes the brain find faces and other recognizable shapes in images or patterns where they don’t actually exist, such as when a stain, a cloud, or a food surface looks like it has a face.
There was even a brief debate about whether it was a divine sign. They thought of Min, the Egyptian god of male virility, before reaching a consensus that it was pure coincidence. The tumor turned out to be benign, and the doctors removed the testicle.
Science called it a coincidence; on the screen, it looked like a scream in the middle of a diagnosis.