Virgin Mary Sighting In Log Dean Hansen Cut Near Utah Home

Virgin Mary sightings are branching is Utah, where a man claims he found the image of the Holy Mother and baby Jesus in a piece of wood.

Dean Hansen made the extraordinary discovery about six weeks ago when he and his uncle, Lee Taylor, were in central Utah cutting up pinyon pine wood for tent posts and firewood, KSTU-TV reported.

When we first saw it, we were like wow, Hansen told the station.

Hansen is keeping the 3-inch-thick circle in a safe place while he decides whether or not to put it on display.

Luckily, for true believers, there are still plenty of other sightings to check out, such as the one reported last month at one lucky New Jersey car wash where the Virgin Mother herself allegedly appeared in a cloud of smoke.

The blessed virgin also showed up in a tree trunk in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., this past summer as well as one in New York City.

Or did they?

A study conducted last year at Northwestern University suggested that humans are wired to look for familiarity and meaning in the most abstract squiggles.

To arrive at this finding, researchers asked 10 volunteers to look at squiggles while lying under a brain scanner and then rate the meaningfulness of each squiggle.

When the volunteers saw the images for a second time, they had catalogued these squiggles as faces or animals or something else that was meaningful to them and, therefore, had no reason to analyze the shapes again.