SETI public: Faking space photos

WHEN IT COMES to space, seeing is not necessarily believing.

Consider the photo that landed on my desk the other day. At first it looks like one of the standard Mars shots that NASA has been posting online for more than a month now.

It shows the front of the Spirit rover in the foreground and the now-famous ruddy, rock-strewn Martian landscape. But look a bit further into the distance and you'll see them - a Starbucks and a McDonald's arch, looking quite at home.

A friend who found the photo on the Web passed a print on to me, and it generated quite a few laughs at the office - along with some dark oaths from photographers to the effect that this kind of junk is why people don't believe the pictures they see anymore.

Meanwhile, there's nothing like a torrent of legitimate photos from space to bring out the UFO freaks, conspiracy theorists and fanatics who claim to see ancient cities, faces and religious images in pictures of the Martian surface and faraway galaxies.