Whada Heck That Thang Is, Y'all?

[Mergie Master]

NASA spots strange glowing object near Mercury (short video at site)

UFO enthusiasts claim it's a 'cloaked alien ship'



A NASA spacecraft has captured some odd-looking images in the sky near the planet Mercury, and UFO enthusiasts are all over it -- but don't panic just yet.

A Huffington Post article describes the photos taken by NASA's Heliospheric Imager-1 telescope on December 1. Scientists say the photos captured a huge coronal mass ejection (CME) streaming from the sun.

As the solar wind material streamed across Mercury, the image shows something very large and bright just to the right of the small planet. That is what has UFO enthusiasts are hoping and claiming they're seeing "the real alien deal."

Discovery News says YouTube user siniXster used the U.S. Navy's SECCHI website to gather the images and create a video of the "extraordinary extraterrestrial encounter."

In a video the user created on December 3, he refers to the object as a spaceship, saying "obviously it is cloaked and does not appear until the CME hits it."

He adds that it is "definitely some sort of manufactured object."

However, scientists have another explanation for the bizarre image, which they put in a response to the video, posted on the SECCHI website. It's essentially a negative imprint or after-image from the day before, since scientists say they need to do an "interpolation between two daily median images" for the CME to be enhanced for viewing.

Still, it will be hard to convince some of the die-hard believers that this wasn't a glimpse of the final frontier.