In his classic song, "All Shook Up," Elvis Presley sang about itching like a man on a fuzzy tree.
Now, Elvis is really branching out. His kingly image has been spotted in an elm tree, according to the Scotsman.
At least that's the claim of Brit John Rowley, who was driving in Herefordshire, England, and saw the tree that he thought looked remarkably like Presley in his young pre-Army stint, not his puffy Las Vegas incarnation of the 1970s.
“I was just driving along one day and it stuck out like a sore thumb," Rowley told SWNS. “I’m not much of an Elvis fan, but I just noticed that unique quiff straight away and said, ‘That tree looks like Elvis.'"
Elvis trees, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder. While Rowley thinks the Elvis elm is a "treemendous likeness," it may be a matter of perception than a real depiction of Presley.
Humans are hard-wired to recognize patterns. That might be why some people see the image of Jesus in a pizza, according to a study conducted in 2011 at Northwestern University.
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.
Elvis isn't the only icon who has shown up in trees or plants.
In November, Utah resident Dean Hansen claimed he found the image of the Holy Mother and baby Jesus in a piece of pine he was cutting up for firewood.
In June, 2011, residents of Kinston, N.C., became convinced that kudzu clinging to a utility pole bore a startling resemblance to Jesus on the cross.
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