If you have a teenager or child at home who is obsessed with aliens, you’ll know what this story is about. A man in Panama, known only as Kin on social media, began uploading videos to TikTok showing that a meteorite had fallen in his backyard in the Pedregal district. What started as a simple anecdote ended up being a social media revolution that puts the novel The War of the Worlds to shame.
We still don’t know if the world is in danger, but Kin had a special effects department worthy of a Steven Spielberg movie. The only thing we know for sure is that Kin has been uploading videos of the meteorite every few hours and how the alien —or at least what we can call a strange creature— began to grow. What started out looking like a tiny and weird octopus ended up being a creature worthy of the Netflix series Stranger Things or HBO’s The Last of Us.
What started out as alarming news for scientists ended up being simply a ploy to go viral on the Internet. We are sure that the local authorities contacted Kin. After all, no country would let a person drive in the middle of the night with an alien hidden in a safe — yes, that is exactly what happened.
But… was it really aliens?
There’s nothing Reddit members love more than a mystery. If that mystery is interplanetary, even better. Reddit detectives —as people who have too much free time and live perpetually on the Internet like to call themselves— detected inconsistencies in the videos: the alien changed texture and color depending on the TikTok video. That already reeked of editing and physical models. Handy internet users considered it to be a polymer mixed with solvents: this allowed the alien to swell or contract in a very realistic way, as if it were an octopus with tentacles.
Special effects such as slow motion lighting and video editing were also used. After all, it’s not the first video to be manipulated just to be posted on the internet and get an audience.
No matter how well done the henna tattoo was, it was normal for people to view it with great skepticism. In the end, it turned out to be nothing more than sensationalism left over from the internet (what in any other era would be called a hoax). However, for most internet users, it was nothing more than a funny and very well-done story. Science fiction fans began to relate it to many moments in popular culture: some were reminded of the movie The Thing, others said they were eagerly awaiting the moment when the lunch scene in Alien would be recreated. However, others couldn’t help but see the resemblance between the tic toc alien and Venom, the Marvel character.
Could an alien arrive on Earth like this?
As spectacular as it may seem, it is impossible for an organic alien to arrive on our planet inside a meteorite. The simple reason lies in the temperature; a meteorite reaches high temperatures when it enters the atmosphere. Between the extreme temperature and friction, this meteorite makes contact with the Earth completely sterilized and, therefore, no living organism would remain on its surface… or inside it.
For now, Kim and her meteorite-arriving alien will join the long history of the internet. They will transcend into the folklore of bizarre and completely unrealistic stories, but for now, scientists can breathe easy again… even though we’ve had a good laugh, we hope that the Panamanian authorities have given Kin a good telling off. We’re sure that next Halloween there will be lots of people recreating this alien inside a safe.