14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week, a researcher by the name of Alan Stern gave a speech at the University of Alberta in Canada. He talked about NASA's mission to Pluto and teased that, this Thursday, the US space agency would announce a major discovery.
“Nasa won't let me tell you what we're going to tell you on Thursday. It's amazing,” The Guardian quotes Alan Stern as saying.
Then, the scientist also made another observation that snowballed into rumors that NASA has found aliens on dwarf planet Pluto, and that this was the big announcement it would make this Thursday. “This world is alive,” the scientist said.
That was it. That was all it took for conspiracy theorists and alien hopefuls to get to talking about how there might be life on distant Pluto.
Until NASA squashed their hopes and expectations
Soon after Alan Stern gave his speech at the University of Alberta and the rumor that NASA's New Horizons mission might have found evidence of life on dwarf planet Pluto started circulating, the space agency took to Twitter to, well, burst everyone's bubble.
“There is a false rumor going around that there will be a big New Horizons science announcement tomorrow. Completely false,” the space agency tweeted heartbreakingly matter-of-factly.
By the looks of it, whatever scientist Alan Stern said in his speech was hugely misinterpreted. There is no major New Horizons announcement coming and no alien lifeforms, green and three-eyed or otherwise, have been discovered on Pluto. Well, not yet anyways.
True, New Horizons data and images hint that the orb is surprisingly Earth-like and that there might even be an ocean hidden under its surface, but so far there is no evidence of life on it.
Remember, New Horizons' flyby of Pluto brought it as close as 7,750 miles (12,470 kilometers) to the orb's surface. No alien cities and amusement parks came into view, and if it's microscopic life we're talking about, there is no way the probe could have detected it from this far away.
There is a false rumor going around that there will be a BIG New Horizons science announcement tomorrow. Completely false.
— NewHorizons2015 (@NewHorizons2015) October 7, 2015
