What’s going on?

A researcher has claimed that NASA found evidence pointing to alien life on Mars and purposely failed to investigate it.

Oooooooooh …

Barry DiGregorio, a researcher at Buckingham University, told Metro that "NASA has a long history of avoiding the life on Mars issue – ever since the Viking Landers in 1976.”

Earlier this year, DiGregorio said NASA found “stick-like figures” on Mars that resemble trace fossils found on Earth. Trace fossils are impressions that lifeforms leave behind, such as footprints, burrows or trails.

NASA tweeted the image of “stick-like figures” captured by the Curiosity River earlier this year with this tentative explanation: “Maybe they're crystals? Or they could be minerals that filled spaces where crystals dissolved away.”

What else did he say?

DiGregorio, an ichnology expert and author of “The Microbes of Mars,” believes the impressions are evidence that “soft-bodied creatures” once lived on Mars.

"The order came down from NASA HQ that they should move the rover on to the next point,” he said. “They didn't feel it was important enough to look at, I thought that was very odd, despite the fact a gale crater was host to probably a series of lakes for billions and billions of years.”

Wasn’t there another recent story about the government and aliens?

Yes. The New York Times reported last year that the Pentagon spent $22 million investigating UFOs as part of a mysterious program pushed by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

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