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Internet Sleuths Have Found Aliens Again

An astronaut's photo has UFO fans—and some gullible media—in a tizzy.

Last week, astronaut Scott Kelly tweeted a photo that he took from a window of the International Space Station, where he has been living for nearly eight months. The shot shows city lights glowing from the surface of Southern India, but Kelly's followers quickly noticed something else: a cigar-shaped smudge, punctuated by two bands of light, barely visible in the upper right hand corner of the frame.

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The online reaction was swift.

"What is that in the upper right corner?" asked a Twitter user.

"UFO," answered another.

Those replies might have been jokes, but the photo captured the imagination of the online UFO scene. A paranormal enthusiast on YouTube uploaded a video about the photo, and a prominent blog called UFO Sightings Daily ran a post on it ("It looks like Scott was trying to hint at the existence of aliens," reads that post. "Message received Scott, and thanks.")

CBS ran a skeptical story about the photo, but then Fox News ran a comparatively breathless piece. Fox commenters quickly weighed in with their own theories.

"Why would a UFO even have lights," asked one commenter. "Advanced as they are, surely they don't need lights. My guess Chinese."

Though Kelly hasn't commented on the UFO photo, it's not uncommon for contemporary astronauts to regularly post to Twitter and Instagram. His fellow space traveler, astronaut Chris Hadfield, recorded a cover of David Bowie's 1969 single Space Oddity that went massively viral in 2013. NASA itself has embraced social media in recent years, even hiring a social media manager to coordinate its strategy and accounts.

That means astronauts regularly engage with the public regarding space research and exploration, but it also gives pseudoscientists and alien enthusiasts new tools to research and promote off-center theories. Now they can pore over photos from the New Horizons probe or the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers in search of signs of anything unusual—a phenomenon that gives rise to a news cycle in which every few months, the media converges on a tantalizing-yet-thin sign of extraterrestrial life.

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Motherboard's Jason Koebler, for example, recently profiled a guy who runs a YouTube channel alleging, among other things, that an ancient Martian civilization was destroyed by a planet-wide nuclear war. (Sample quote: "I believe that after a nuclear war broke out on Mars… The surviving Martian race emigrated to the Earth, building the Pyramids and Sphinx.") Terrestrially, a Navy test fire near Los Angeles earlier this month prompted speculation about UFOs, and back in August, CNN reported that would-be Mulders had located a derelict alien spaceship in a photo sent back from Curiosity. Last year, the Daily Mail reported that a statue of Barack Obama's head had been found on the surface of the Red Planet.

Conspiracy theories about NASA are nothing new—in 2002, a 72-year-old Buzz Aldrin punched a man in the face for suggesting that the M oon landings were staged—but on the web, it's easier than ever for them to spread.

Kelly doesn't appear to have acknowledged the furor over his photo, but others have stepped in to point out that the alleged alien craft is most likely an external part of the station or a reflection from the inside. A brightness-adjusted version of the original photo appears to show that the object is in fact a bright spot on the exterior of the space station rather than a free-floating object.

"Eyewitness accounts are not enough," physicist Michio Kaku told CBS of the Kelly photo. "That's why we want something tangible—an alien chip, alien DNA—then the debate is over."

A spokesperson for NASA did not respond to a request for comment by press time.