Welcome, Alien Overlords!

Don’t look now, but aliens are circling Mercury in an enormous, cloaked spaceship.  At least, that’s what some people believe.   They point to an image recorded by NASA’s STEREO spacecraft, which shows a coronal mass ejection from the Sun flowing over Mercury and, apparently, another object of comparable size.

UFO enthusiasts contend that the image captures a planet-sized cloaked spacecraft, rendered visible only by the electronically charged material from the Sun.  However, scientists say the apparent shape really is just Mercury, at its position the previous day, that shows up as a result of the enhanced imaging techniques NASA uses for space photographs.  The scientific explanation is boring, so it’s a lot more exciting to speculate about huge spaceships.

If there are aliens orbiting Mercury in a masked spacecraft, what the heck are they doing there?  After all, any alien race that could build and power a planet-sized spaceship, send it careening to a distant solar system, shield it from our perception, and park it into orbit around Mercury without anyone noticing obviously has technological capabilities far beyond ours.  If they want to conquer Earth, what are they waiting for?  They could waltz over and pulverize us in short order.

Of course, it could be a ship of alien scientists who just want to study the puny affairs of humans, like we might study an ant farm.  It’s hard to imagine that we are of interest to an advanced alien race, but we humans have always found ourselves fascinating, so perhaps aliens would, too.  Hey, if the aliens can hide a spaceship as large as a planet, maybe they’ve landed already!  Maybe they’re here right now, invisible and undetectable, observing us, taking notes, and getting ready to file a report about whether we should be permitted to survive or whether we should be stamped out before we spread across the galaxy like a virus.

We’d all better be on our best behavior, in hopes that we impress our alien overlords as a promising race that is well worth saving.  I’m looking at you, Congress!