Japan has a museum dedicated to rocks that look like people, animals, and other things our brains have decided to see in random geology. The Chichibu Chinsekikan, or Hall of Curious Rocks, houses more than 1,700 of them, including stones resembling Elvis, ducks, sheep, and assorted mysterious faces. This is simultaneously one of the greatest displays of nature pareidolia and rock collections I’ve seen.
The collection began when Shōji Hayama encountered a rock whose fossilized shells looked uncannily like a face. He took it as a sign, and began collecting more. Eventually he had thousands, leading to the museum’s opening in 1990. His daughter later took over the collection, which continues to grow today.
There’s something magical in the simplicity of the whole thing. Nobody carved these faces, they are a combination of erosion and human imagination. Visitors can even name stones that haven’t been identified yet.
More about pareidolia in unexpected places:
Boing Boing has visited this exact museum before, back when its collection numbered around 1,000 rocks resembling everyone from Elvis to E.T. in a short video about Japan’s rock-face museum. Pareidolia turns up in stranger places too: photographer François Robert spent decades finding faces hiding in mops, sockets, and lemons, and artists built a computer vision system that hunts for faces in grains of sand.