A “mothership” in a SOHO image of the Sun? What the image actually shows
According to a UFO blogger, an early-October image from NASA and ESA's SOHO solar observation probe shows an alien mothership several kilometers long. The SOHO team, however, has been explaining for years that spots and streaks regularly appear in the instrument's images that are not objects but traces of particles hitting the detector.
An early-October image from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), which watches the Sun, shows bright, cone-like extensions of the star's outer atmosphere, known as coronal streamers. A white, rectangular spot appears at the edge of the image. This was pointed out by Scott C. Waring, who has been writing about extraterrestrials for decades on his blog called UFO Sightings Daily, and who called the spot a “mothership.”
According to Waring, the craft is roughly 2.5 miles (4 km) long and half a mile (800 m) wide, and could carry tens of thousands of passengers. From the fact that the spot is visible in one image but no longer in the next, he concludes that the object is traveling at enormous speed. He also claims that if the image is switched to a negative view, three smaller, spherical craft also appear, which the mothership is pulling along with some kind of beam. According to him, this “is something NASA will never talk about,” because the public is kept in the dark.
The 3I/ATLAS comparison
To convey the size, Waring brought up the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, which was discovered in July 2025 by the ATLAS telescope network. Based on observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, the diameter of the comet's solid nucleus could range at most from a few hundred meters to 3.5 miles (about 5.6 km). According to Avi Loeb, a Harvard astronomer, and his colleagues, the nucleus is more than 5 kilometers in diameter, but this estimate is disputed by other astronomers. Loeb has left open the possibility of an artificial origin because of several unusual features, but he himself considers it unlikely that it is alien technology.
According to Waring, 3I/ATLAS should already have left the area, so he rules out this explanation, “unless it's passing through again.” Indeed: the comet left the planetary system in March 2026 after passing by Jupiter.
Not the first case
Waring regularly finds “spaceships” in SOHO images. He previously believed he had discovered a Moon-sized, triangular UFO, and he has also claimed that there is a small solar system created by aliens inside the Sun. In connection with similar images, NASA has previously indicated that such “sightings” are mostly caused by tiny pieces of rock and debris or by camera errors.
What do we know, and what don't we?
We know for certain that there is an early-October SOHO image showing a white, rectangular spot, and that Waring interprets it as a mothership. The image was taken with SOHO's coronagraph called LASCO, which blocks out the Sun's disk so that the fainter solar corona can be observed.
The claims about the size, the speed and the “tractor beam” are not backed by any measurement or calculation. Waring derives the speed solely from the fact that the spot is not in the same place in two consecutive images, or is not visible in both. The “smaller craft” discovered in the negative view are an interpretation that depends on after-the-fact processing of the image. The probe's operators have not commented on the specific image.
The sober take
SOHO's LASCO coronagraph uses an occulting disk to block out the Sun's bright disk so that it can observe the faint solar corona around it and solar eruptions. According to the probe's own description, some of the shapes visible in the images result from objects blocking the camera, which creates shadows and shapes. One example is the shadow of the pylon holding the occulting disk, which runs from the corner of the image to the center.
Even more common are cosmic rays and high-energy particles of the solar wind. These hit the detector and leave all kinds of spots, from a single pixel to streaks spanning a large part of the image. The SOHO team specifically warns that many people see such a spot in one image and another one near it in the next, and believe that the same object moved. This fits Waring's reasoning exactly: the spot appears in one image and disappears in the next because it was not an object but a single impact of a particle.
The white, rectangular spot is therefore most likely such a particle trace or an image artifact. A truly 4-kilometer object near the Sun would be visible in several consecutive images and on other instruments as well. SOHO has, incidentally, discovered several thousand comets since 1996, meaning it records real, moving celestial bodies particularly well.
Sources
- Brit Brief – NASA probe snaps ‘2.5-mile alien mothership’ zooming past Sun
- Leonard David – Loeb becslése a 3I/ATLAS tömegéről és méretéről
- Jason Wright (Penn State) – No, Loeb Has Not Shown the Size of 3I/ATLAS to be around 5 km
- USA Today / Yahoo – Is comet 3I/ATLAS alien tech?
- NewsNation – 3I/ATLAS és a Jupiter
- IBTimes – Waring korábbi SOHO-állításai
- IBTimes – A NASA „űrkorpa” magyarázata