'Jellyfish-Shaped UFO': Bizarre Figure Standing on Mars Surface Vanished Less Than Minute Later

A newly resurfaced NASA image has ignited fresh debate over possible life on Mars, after space enthusiasts spotted what they call a 'Jellyfish-Shaped' UFO apparently standing on the planet's surface before vanishing less than a minute later.

The curious object appears in a panoramic photograph taken by NASA's Curiosity rover in Gale Crater on 20 August 2023 at around 6.27pm ET, but is absent from another shot of the same area captured moments before.

Curiosity has been trundling across Mars since 2012, tasked with one central question: could the Red Planet ever have supported microbial life? Fourteen years into that mission, its cameras have sent back hundreds of thousands of images of rock formations, dust devils and empty horizons. Most pass with little fanfare.

A small minority, like this alleged Jellyfish-Shaped UFO, slot neatly into the public's long-running fascination with Martian mysteries.

The panorama, taken in Gale Crater, shows a familiar scene of dusty ridges and distant mountains. In the far left corner, however, a small, dark figure seems oddly out of place.

It looks, at least in the low-resolution crop now circulating online, like a bulbous black 'body' balanced on two thin legs. The intrigue deepens because that same patch of terrain appears empty in an image taken less than a minute earlier.

Adding to the suspicion for some, the frame containing the oddity was the final Curiosity image posted on NASA's site for that Martian day. The next publicly released photograph from the rover came nearly two hours later, with its camera pointed in a different direction.

There are no official images showing whether the object moved, approached the rover, or simply never existed outside a glitch.

Jellyfish-Shaped UFO Image Reposted by Space Enthusiasts

The Jellyfish-Shaped UFO only began drawing widespread attention this week, when space enthusiast Kari Sivertzen picked it out of NASA's public archive and reposted it on X.

Sivertzen, who regularly combs rover imagery for anomalies, told followers: 'Sometimes I spot things that catch my eye, and I share them here. I believe there is life on other planets, and since NASA has found potential traces of life on Mars, it's the perfect place to look.'

Her post quickly pulled in comments from UFO watchers and sceptics alike. 'One of the best Mars UFO photographs I've seen!' one user replied, echoing the buzz that has grown around the image.

Independent Mars researcher Jean Ward went further, branding the object a 'Jellyfish-shaped UFO/UAP spotted on Mars' and suggesting that it 'seems to be interacting with the surface.' Ward added that its shape reminded him of a 'tripod-like object,' drawing comparisons to the towering alien war machines in the film War of the Worlds.

Others imagined something more architectural than biological. 'Looks like a tower or some type of structure, a dome on top... a relic from Mars distant past civilisation,' one commenter claimed.

Another viewer dismissed the extraterrestrial drama but admitted the strangeness of the silhouette: 'Looks like a scarecrow to me! Really, what is it? Doesn't look like a dust devil!'

NASA's Mars Work Continues as Jellyfish-Shaped UFO Speculation Grows

Behind the social media swirl sits a less glamorous reality. NASA has not commented specifically on the Jellyfish-Shaped UFO image, but mission scientists routinely describe such odd one-off shapes as 'artifacts' corrupted pixels, camera noise or compression errors that sneak into data sent across tens of millions of miles. Without a second, confirming frame, engineers tend to treat them with caution at best and suspicion at worst.

Some online sleuths tried to ground the mystery in hardware rather than aliens, suggesting the figure might be the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which made history in 2021 with the first powered, controlled flight on another world. That idea collapsed under basic geography: Ingenuity is operating in a completely different crater, more than 2,000 miles away from Curiosity's position in Gale Crater.

NASA's broader stance on Martian life is, if anything, more conservative than many of its followers. In September 2025 the agency announced that its Perseverance rover had discovered the clearest signs yet of ancient microbial life in a sample from another region of Mars. Even then, US officials stressed that no evidence of intelligent life present or past has been found.

Curiosity itself has spent more than a decade climbing through the layered rocks of Gale Crater, an impact basin roughly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, with a central mountain rising out of the dust. Its instruments, as with Perseverance's, are tuned to pick apart the planet's climate history and the chemistry of its clays and sediments, searching for long-gone microbes rather than walking tripods.

What the Jellyfish-Shaped UFO episode really exposes is the gap between the painstaking science and the human impulse to see patterns.

Psychologists call it pareidolia: our tendency to read faces into clouds, animals into cliff shapes, and, inevitably, structures and figures into blurry Martian rocks. It is the same quirk that turned an eroded hill into the famous 'Face on Mars' when NASA's Viking 1 orbiter snapped it in 1976. Higher-resolution images later showed nothing more than an ordinary mound with suggestive shadows.

Every new rover panorama offers another chance for that pattern-seeking instinct to run wild. Doorways, statues, even supposed 'people' have been claimed in the reddish noise of previous Curiosity and Perseverance shots.

Officials at NASA and in Washington, including during the Trump administration when plans for a first crewed mission to Mars by the end of the decade were touted, have generally welcomed public engagement but stayed firm that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

In the case of the Jellyfish-Shaped UFO, that proof does not yet exist. There is a single ambiguous image, a missing minute, and a lot of people online happy to fill in the gaps. Nothing about the object has been confirmed, so all interpretations from camera glitch to alien machine should be taken with a grain of salt.