THE "FACIAL" FEATURES
Richard Hoagland noticed that if you mirror the left side of the face and copy it to the right, you get a humanoid face. If you mirror the right side and copy it to the left, you get a feline face (a lion, perhaps). He used this as as a reference to the Egypt Sphinx, since it is also a mixture of a humanoid and a feline (human face on a cat). Like this:
 
Well, you certainly can't do this with the new picture... Or? We'll see that a bit later...
Now let's remember that the new pictures is viewed clearly more from the left. To get a more accurate view from the top, some retouching must be made. The following images demonstrate how the shaded and lit regions can be used to estimate heights.
 
Using the center curve as reference I "turned" the face a little to the left; and the result is this:
  
In the animation (where the shades have been inverted to negative), you can see that the match is pretty good, but still the "face" seem to turn a little to the right. This can be seen from the "nose" (the peak of the mountain) as well as the "pimple" on the left.
Now if the mirroring is done according to the absolut center axis, the result is this:
 
But when the axis is moved to the right (which is not too far fetched, supposing even the corrected image is still viewed a bit from the left), we get a closer match to the Viking "faces". The lion is very similar, but the region above the "ape's" mouth is strangely different. I guess this can be explained with the different lighting: |