Fact Check: Does ‘Alien’ Video Show UFO Drawing Energy From the Sun?

Renewed activity from the U.S. military and Pentagon appears to have reenergized fantasies and theories about the presence of life on alien planets.

Disclosures from the security agencies about its work to identify what the Pentagon calls “unidentified aerial phenomena” has sparked new claims and even footage of what some believe to be visitors from another world.

In one recent social media post, which gathered the attention of thousands of UFO hunters, footage of the sun was shown as proof of an alien spacecraft using the star’s heat to refuel.

The Claim

A Reddit post, published on October 5, 2022, shows what looks like a long, black tornado-like thread protruding from the sun before disappearing.

A caption reads: “Aliens exist in front of everyone. NASA knows. The Government knows. This is one of their ships caught refueling directly from our Sun.”

The Facts

Firstly, while not claimed to be so, the footage shared on Reddit was not captured recently. Using reverse image search, Newsweek was able to trace the clip back to 2012.

Captured by Solar Dynamics Observatory between March 11 and March 12, 2012, when the film was first published it was quickly shared among alien and UFO enthusiasts as proof of a spacecraft, using the sun’s rays to refuel.

As exciting as that may sound, it’s not true.

In an article from 2012, Pulitzer Prize winning science writer Natalie Wolchover explained that the feature, which appears to protrude from the edge of the sun and enter into a circular dark space, is known as a “prominence”.

As explained in Wolchover’s article, the “prominence” is an area of “cooler, denser plasma (highly ionized gas) than the surrounding 3.5-million-degree Fahrenheit corona” that can extend thousands of miles into space.

The dark object it feeds into is a tunnel-shaped feature called a filament channel. Even though the object looks circular, it’s a trick of the angle the sun is being viewed at.

The moment the prominence appears to disappear into space, Wolchover writes, is an “outburst of the sun’s magnetic field called a coronal mass ejection.”

Similar footage of other coronal mass ejections has been shared by NASA elsewhere.

The footage shared on Reddit can be recreated through helioviewer.org, a NASA-affiliated site that allows anyone to create videos of the sun.

Using the same time stamps and satellite cameras used to capture the prominence, Newsweek was able to reproduce the same video.

However, not all hope is lost for UFO hunters. Earlier this year the U.S. military established a new office to expand its investigations of unidentified flying objects.

The Pentagon announced the creation of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office in July 2022, whose mission as described by spokesperson Sue Gough was to investigate “anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects.”

The Ruling

Misleading Material.

The footage shared on social media is from 2012 and shows what is known as a “prominence”, a dense area of cooler, plasma (a body of highly ionized gas) protruding from the edge of the sun. The prominence then disappears in what is called a coronal mass ejection.

FACT CHECK BY Newsweek’s Fact Check team