NASA's Curiosity Rover on Mars captured a mysterious ‘jellyfish’ with two small legs and a body sparking theories of alien life on the Red planet

A NASA image of Mars has captured a mysterious object in the distance that some believe resembles a jellyfish-like being or a mechanical device. NASA's Curiosity rover, which has spent over a decade investigating whether Mars could have supported microbial life, took the photo on August 20, 2023, at around 6:27 pm ET.

The image shows the dusty Martian landscape with rocky hills and mountains rising in the background. In the left corner of the panorama, a small figure stands out with what looks like a dark body sitting on top of two thin, spindly legs.

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A figure that appears and disappears

What makes the image stand out is timing.

Photos taken of the same spot less than a minute earlier show no trace of the figure, fuelling speculation that Curiosity may have caught something moving across the surface.

The photo also happens to be the last one Curiosity posted that day, with the next image coming nearly two hours later and pointed in a different direction, leaving no further frames to confirm what the object was or whether it moved at all.

Social media runs with it

The image is being widely shared and discussed online. Some believes there could be life on other planets, saying this just proves it. Some describes the object as a jellyfish-shaped UFO that appears to be interacting with the Martian surface, and some say it looks like a tripod-like structure. Some users compare it to the towering alien machines from "War of the Worlds."

Not everyone is convinced. Sceptics argue the black shape is simply corrupted or dead pixels in the photo. One theory suggested it could be NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, but that has been ruled out since Ingenuity operates more than 2,000 miles away in a completely different crater.

Where the photo was taken

The image was captured in Gale Crater, where Curiosity has been exploring since 2012. The crater is roughly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, with a large mountain rising from its centre, and scientists consider it one of the most promising sites for evidence that microbial life once existed on Mars.

Why the brain sees shapes like this

Discoveries like this tend to spread quickly because of pareidolia, the tendency of the human brain to spot familiar shapes, such as faces or figures, in random or ambiguous patterns. It's the same effect behind seeing faces in clouds or animals in rock formations, and Mars has produced its own famous case of this: the so-called "Face on Mars," photographed by NASA's Viking 1 orbiter in 1976, which later high-resolution imaging showed to be an ordinary eroded hill shaped by shadows and low photo quality.

The bigger picture on Mars

NASA has said it found the clearest evidence yet of ancient microbial life on Mars in a sample collected by the Perseverance rover, believed to have formed in a dry river channel around 3.7 billion years ago. At the same time, NASA and the White House maintain that no evidence of intelligent life has been found on the planet. NASA is now working with the current administration on plans for a crewed mission to Mars by the end of the decade.