Last week, a piece of space junk crashed into a savannah in Namibia, Africa. Though NASA wrote it off as just another “Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessel”, or COPV, which are pretty common in space and often survive reentry and land on Earth intact, local authorities knew they had something special. In a press conference, Namibian president, Hifikepunye Lucas Pohamba, addressed press questions, “Oh yes, we did open it. It was filled with dead ants. We’ve recruited some experts to examine them, and they haven’t been able to identify them.”

He went on, “Carbon dating suggests that the ants are over 20,000 years old, which obviously makes no sense in any conventional way.” The international community, so far, has shown little reaction. When pressed on the matter, EU Secretary for Extraterrestrial affairs gave the following statement: “We do not believe the object is any reason for alarm. Many ants were launched into space during the 1970s in COPVs and we reject any results suggesting the ants date back to the stone age. Who even cared about ants back then? It’s a bunch of bologna, if you ask me.”

We’ll be following this story closely. I’m personally interested to find out if the ants are 100% carbon based, or if they have traces of silicon or arsenic. Stay tuned and stay watchful.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 23rd, 2011 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Discoveries, Extraterrestrial Life, Insects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.