Miss Utah on Flub -- I Zoned Out and Never HEARD the Question During Miss USA 2013 Fail

Miss Utah is beyond humiliated after her epic Q&A fail at the Miss USA pageant, and she's blaming her brain fart on a massive case of nerves ... TMZ has learned.

Sources close to Marissa Powell tell TMZ the beauty queen's mortified after babbling ... "we need to see how to create education better" while attempting to answer a question about salary inequality for women.

Marissa's now telling friends she botched the response because she was so anxious she spaced out during the question, and never really heard it.

Instead of asking the judge to repeat the question ... Marissa decided to fake an answer, but got more and more flustered as she tried to improvise.

Takes you back to high school, right?

Or maybe to 2007 with the South Carolina, and such as ...