Richard Nixon spotted in Hamilton hedge raises the prospect of plant consciousness and face pareidolia

It's a phenomenon known as face pareidolia. You've probably seen faces on the moon and Jesus Christ did famously appear in a cheese toastie.

The University of Sydney has, thankfully, taken a close look at this matter.

"There is a great benefit in detecting faces quickly," Professor David Atlas, of the School of Psychology, said last year.

As such, he said lots of things can "trigger a face detection response".

That's probably what happened when a Topics spy spotted a face in a hedge at Hamilton. Funnily enough, Aldous Huxley wrote about "the hedge at the bottom of the garden" in his book, The Doors of Perception.

The hedge stands as a metaphor for the nature of reality, in which duration is replaced by a perpetual present.

Now keep in mind here that our spy sometimes gets his information from Russian propaganda, but we'll take what he says here with an open mind.

He also has connections to the deep state and hopes that, someday soon, the energy that powers UFOs will solve the Earth's energy troubles. We reckon wind and solar will do a mighty fine job as the technology advances, but we're all for anti-gravity technology, as long as it doesn't destroy the fabric of the universe, sending us all out of the perpetual present and into oblivion.

"Some years ago, I read about a guy called Cleve Backster, a former CIA guy, turned private investigator who decided one day to hook the plant in his office to a lie detector," our spy said.

This led to Backster's theory of primary perception, in which he claimed that plants feel pain and have extrasensory perception (ESP), which was widely reported in the media at the time. The scientific establishment rejected his claims.

Our spy noted that South African botanist Lyall Watson wrote a book in 1973 called Supernature, in which he claimed that plants had emotions. Scientists dismissed it at the time as hippie nonsense.

But new research released in 2012 found that plants appear to react to sounds and may make clicking noises to communicate with each other.

Author Michael Pollan wrote about "plant intelligence" in The New Yorker in 2013, saying plants can sense, learn, remember and react in ways familiar to humans.

Our spy said: "Given what science has learned about plants and their ability to sense water at a distance and send roots that way - and perhaps even share nutrients between themselves in a community to 'aid' a sick plant in their midst, I don't think we can dismiss out of hand the potential for plants to have some form of consciousness.

"So on Sunday, I trimmed my front hedge, something I don't do that often, partly out of laziness and partly due to creeping guilt in case Backster was right."

Just before he went to bed on Sunday night, he was sitting on his front verandah, admiring his handiwork, when he looked to his right, through the branches of bushes four houses down the street and on the other side of the road.

"It was a bright night, near full moon, and there's a street light down there as you can see, but as soon as I turned to look down there I just about jumped off the bench I was on. There was a huge seemingly spotlit green face, with a definite scowl, as though it had been watching me during the afternoon, or just seen me. Richard Nixon in foliage!"

Now we need someone to send an image of Vladmir Putin's face in a hedge and more images of it being chopped to smithereens.