UFO hunters and enthusiasts set their wishful thinking engines to full throttle this week, claiming that the tiny 230-feet wide piece of space rock gravitationally attached to the mountain-sized near-Earth asteroid 2004 BL86 is actually an alien spacecraft.

As Yahoo News (UK and Ireland edition) reported Jan. 28, news from NASA that asteroid 2004 BL86 was not a lone traveler through space was not only met with excitement from astronomers but drew the interest of the world. Among those whose interest it drew were a contingent quick to question NASA's findings and provide an interpretation of the images taken by the Deep Space Network antenna in Goldstone, California, and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The giant asteroid had no moon, they said. What it had was a UFO, a diamond-shaped spacecraft, as a traveling companion.

"This asteroid has a UFO flying in orbit around it," Scott C. Waring of UFO Sightings Daily posited. "We can see from the detailed photo that the craft is diamond shaped and flat. NASA of course goes on to say that this flat object which does not flip over end is a moon. Wrong! Any moon this thin would be tumbling end over end. This object is keeping itself steady, flying like a ship would in space. Great catch by Streetcap1 of Youtube."

Streetcap1 of YouTube is a steady supplier of UFO footage to the internet, one often cited and posted by UFO Sightings Daily and other enthusiast websites. His findings include various anomalies picked up by NASA's cameras on the International Space Station as well as other strange sightings and detections gleaned from NASA photos and videos.

Still, to paraphrase an old Freudian adage, sometimes a moon is just a moon. Until asteroid 2004 BL86 could get close enough for telescopic devices to get a good fix on it, little was known about the near-Earth object other than its approximate size (the estimation of which was found to be 500 feet more than the actuality, the asteroid being only 1,100 feet in diameter) and the estimated distance from Earth it would reach on its fly-by. It was only then that the giant asteroid was found to have a moon.

Of course, this isn't the first time UFO enthusiasts have found one of the Solar System's spacefarers to be a spaceship. When Comet ISON made its inner Solar System appearance in 2013, conspiracy theorists were quick to counter scientific findings with their own ideas of how the comet was actually a spaceship. And in September 2014, when Comet 67P made its approach, making history as the first comet to ever be orbited by a manmade satellite and have a device landed upon its surface, the internet burned with the intriguing conspiracy theory that the comet was actually a alien warship. In an odd twist, another UFO enthusiast would later spot what looked like an alien "monastery" on the comet's surface.

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