that book by jacques penry titled looking at faces and remembering them in which he described his police identity kit. penry makes the observation that all faces are made of a very few shapes which fall into a few compositions. there are square round oval and triangular faces and the eyes ears nose mouth and hairline also are limited in where they are placed in the overall shape.
he points out that because these elements only combine in a limited number of faces we all look very much alike. one of the side effects of this is we tend to ignore close similarities of faces of strangers who look like someone we know, but notice the same similarities in faces when someone looks like a relative, an acquaintance, friend, or a famous person.
this phenomena is playing out in the pizzagate controversy. in 2007 a young girl, madeline mccann, was abducted. the similarity between alleged pedophile john podestas face and a suspect in a police wanted poster in the mccann case makes the researchers think podesta was involved in the girls abduction. a suspect poster made using a scotland yard identikit has been seized on by pizzagate researchers as evidence their arch enemy john podesta was involved in the girls abduction.
this can be put down to the tendency for people to see a match where there is none, in this case because they are so eager to expose a pedophile ring they imagine podesta has a part in. but as penry explains there are so few faces that any given random selection of faces will have a high number of matches if you are looking for a face you are already familiar with.
there are then many people who look like podesta, a lot of them are probably feeling a bit uneasy with the way people are looking at them now that podesta is in the news for his alleged association with a pedophile cult. one could as easily make an argument for any number of those people being the person recreated in the scotland yard person of interest poster.
once one has excluded maybe 99 percent of them based on a closer look at the image, and where they were at the time the child was abducted you would not have reduced it to podesta but to him and hundreds if not a couple thousand who look like him and were in the area at the time.
for example michael coloumbe, the head of the canadian security intelligence service (csis) has a face that falls into the same category as podesta, he travels a lot, and is employed in a job that is alleged to use sometimes unorthodox methods in maintaining the security of the western block of euroese nations.
recently because i had seen so much podesta lately and was browsing csis for an other reason it nudged me that coloumbe shares the same face type with podesta. my mind then began suggesting coloumbe in europe abducting children to deliver them for some secret black operation assignment while at the same time making it appear podesta was involved because they look alike.
hmm conspiracy you know it has you in its blood caked claws when you have to fight those spontaneous thoughts.
last year before the vaulting bandit was caught in switzerland i gave more time than i want to admit thinking tim bosma was the same person, based on security cam photos of the bandit and family photos of bosma. ah well if nothing else it proves penrys point that we tend to see a similarity between faces were one face triggers an emotional investment for the other. thankfully reading jacques penrys keeps me from believing my own conspiracy thoughts.
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