Does the “Alien” video show a UFO drawing energy from the Sun?

The renewed activity of the US military and the Pentagon seems to have revived the fantasies and theories about the presence of life on extraterrestrial planets.

Revelations by law enforcement agencies about their work to identify what the Pentagon calls “unidentified aerial phenomena” have sparked new claims and even images of what some believe to be visitors from another world.

In a recent social media post, which attracted the attention of thousands of UFO hunters, images of the sun were shown as proof that an alien spacecraft uses the sun’s heat to refuel.

A video of the sun shared on social media has been put forward as evidence that an alien spacecraft is refueling in the star’s atmosphere. In the image, a solar flare leaves the sun’s surface on March 6, 2012.
NASA/SDO Solar Dynamics Observatory via Getty Images
Claim

A Reddit post, published on October 5, 2022, shows what looks like a long black thread in the shape of a tornado jutting out from the sun before disappearing.

A caption reads: “Aliens exist in front of everyone. NASA knows it. The Government knows it. This is one of their ships caught refueling directly from our Sun.”

The facts

First of all, although this is not claimed to be the case, the images shared on Reddit were not recently captured. Using reverse image search, Newsweek was able to trace the clip back to 2012.

Captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory between March 11-12, 2012, when the film was first released it was quickly shared among alien and UFO enthusiasts as evidence of a spacecraft, using the sun’s rays to refuel.

Although it may seem exciting, it is not true.

In a 2012 article, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Natalie Wolchover explained that the feature, which appears to protrude from the edge of the sun and into a dark circular space, is known as a “prominence.”

As explained in Wolchover’s article, the “prominence” is a zone of “colder and denser plasma (highly ionized gas) than the surrounding 3.5 million degree Fahrenheit corona” that can extend thousands of kilometers into space. .

The dark object it feeds into is a tunnel-like feature called a filament channel. Although the object appears to be circular, it is a trick of the angle at which the sun is viewed.

The moment the prominence appears to disappear into space, Wolchover writes, is a “burst in the sun’s magnetic field called a coronal mass ejection.”

NASA has shared similar images of other coronal mass ejections elsewhere.

Images shared on Reddit can be recreated via helioviewer.org, a NASA-affiliated site that allows anyone to create videos of the sun.

Using the same timestamps and satellite cameras used to capture prominence, Newsweek was able to play the same video.

However, not all hope is lost for UFO hunters. Earlier this year, the US military created a new office to expand its investigations into unidentified flying objects.

The Pentagon announced the creation of the Domain-Wide Anomaly Resolution Office in July 2022, whose mission, as spokeswoman Sue Gough described it, was to investigate “anomalous, unidentified, space, airborne, submerged, and transmedia objects.” .»