Bizarre 'jellyfish' spotted on Mars: NASA image sparks theories

Mysterious discovery on the Red Planet

The photograph was taken by the Curiosity rover back in August 2023, on the 3,924th Martian day of the research laboratory’s mission on the planet.

The black-and-white panorama shows the famous 96-mile-wide Gale Crater, on the slopes of which a strange black object can be seen.

What caught researchers’ attention

Several details make the image particularly mysterious:

• Sudden appearance: In a photograph taken less than 10 seconds earlier, there was no dark object on the slope at all.
• End of the day: This was the last image captured by the rover that day, after which the camera was switched off.
• Silence from official sources: The caption in NASA’s archives only states that the image was taken by the right navigation camera.

The image caught the attention of enthusiast researcher Kari Sievertsen, who has been carefully going through Curiosity’s archival photographs for several months and sharing the most interesting discoveries on X.

Users immediately began offering various theories, ranging from the miniature Ingenuity helicopter to a genuine extraterrestrial object.

Experts’ opinions: UFO or ordinary illusion?

Mars researcher Jean Ward suggested that the three-legged object could potentially be a "UFO" (unidentified flying object).

"As always, until we get there personally and see these anomalies up close, I can only guess what it is," he said.

However, skeptical users and experts urge people not to jump to conclusions. They point to dozens of similar "discoveries" in the past — from egg-shaped craters and Martian "spiders" to hills resembling the ruins of ancient cities.

The main scientific explanations include:

• Pareidolia: A psychological phenomenon in which our brains try to recognize familiar shapes, such as creatures or machinery, in random patterns of rocks and other formations.
• Camera artifacts: Technical glitches, damaged pixels, or digital artifacts that can sometimes occur during signal transmission to Earth under the harsh conditions of space.

Curiosity has been exploring Gale Crater since 2012, steadily searching for tiny traces of microscopic life in ancient rocks.