If the latest YouTube conspiracy theory is true, aliens with technology vastly superior to our own are zooming through the solar system right now, and NASA took its Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft offline last week because it doesn’t you to know.
But the rocket scientists at NASA were no match for YouTuber rob19791, whose video claims he saw a pixel-sized oddity on the SOHO video feed the day before it went offline. And that’s no coincidence, he says in his video captions:
“This is a cover up to prevent us from seeing these things again NASA must have seen this video and started making plans to change the way you and I are alloed [sic] to view it. I think this is proof, that NASA are covering this up [….] Its [sic] too much of a coincidence I find this on the 3rd of May 2012, and they break their telescope the folowing [sic] day. NASA are scared that a minority of people including myself have the ability to find and share these things with the general public.”
Rob19791 has 28 videos on YouTube, all of which claim to show UFOs either orbiting the sun or various planets, hovering near the International Space Station, or crashing somewhere on Earth.
Meanwhile, NASA’s facing some pretty stiff budget cuts this year. Assuming rob19791’s allegations are true—and that’s obviously a huge assumption—it seems odd that NASA would try hiding the alien’s existence rather than milking it. If advanced alien races really are buzzing through our neighborhood, surely even the most tight-fisted congressman would vote to give NASA extra money to observe them?
But we digress. A brief glance at online conspiracy forums suggests that, among others, rob19791’s assertions were taken very seriously by people who probably also expect the world to end later this year as predicted by the Mayans.
The video also generated lots of buzz on Twitter, although Poe’s Law makes it impossible to figure out whether most of the tweets are joking or sincere.