Russians find extraterrestrial hitchhikers on the space station

A Russian cosmonaut claims to have trapped extraterrestrials. Cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov says he found bacteria attached to the outer surface of the International Space Station that did not come from the surface of the Earth.

Shkaplerov told the Russian news agency TASS that cosmonauts collected the bacteria by cleaning the exterior of the space station during spacewalks years ago.

"And now it turns out that somehow these swabs reveal bacteria that were absent during the launch of the ISS module," Shkapkerov told TASS. "That is to say, they have come from outer space and have settled along the outer surface, they are being studied so far and it seems they do not represent any danger."

The cosmonaut prepares for his third trip to the space station next month. The collection of life forms from outside the ISS during one of their previous trips was a kind of controversy a few years ago. Russian scientists reported that the space walk sample harvests yielded evidence of apparent marine plankton clinging to the station . The claims caught NASA by surprise at the time, and they said they had not heard anything from the Russians about the space plankton.

NASA also has to talk about the apparent extraterrestrial bacteria from outer space that is on the surface of the ISS that Shkapkerov claims to have knowledge of. I went to the offices in the ground of the NASA space station program to get more information and update this publication when I heard it.

It seems unlikely that anyone can completely rule out bacteria having terrestrial origins. We know that bacteria and other life forms such as tardigrades can live in extreme conditions such as space, so it is possible that the undiscovered microbes that live in the upper atmosphere of the Earth have been chosen by the space station.

In fact, a recent study claims that high-velocity "space dust" flows could actually launch such microbes on trips from Earth to other worlds . Maybe some bacteria decided to skip that long trip and simply took up residence on the space station. After all, it is known that a visit to the ISS is productive for other lower life forms, like this worm that grew an extra head after his visit .

Technically literate : Original short fiction works with unique perspectives on technology, exclusively at CNET.

Crowd Control : A crowdsourcing science fiction novel written by CNET readers.