A post about a mysterious statue found in Switzerland has gone viral on Reddit.
An image of the unusual finding was shared by u/kirkbot, with a caption saying, "found an alien statue head in a riverbed." The post has received 61,000 upvotes since it was shared on August 26.
The picture shows the head of an alien-type figure with large eyes sticking out of a riverbed at the foot of a person standing next to it.
The 35-year-old Reddit user, who did not share his name or location, told Newsweek: "We were going to collect and skip rocks on the bank of the Linth River in Switzerland. Towards the end of our trip, I pointed out this rock that had a hint of blue shine that I haven't seen in other rocks.
"My girlfriend joked that it almost looked like an alien. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to indeed be the head of what looked like a life-sized alien statue," he said.
The Redditor said the couple later discovered that the statue head was a sculpture made by some students who lived in an old home nearby many years ago.
In early March, the Pentagon released a report on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) that confirmed that U.S. government investigations since the end of World World II found no evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
The report stated: "All investigative efforts, at all levels of classification, concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification."
The February 2024 report followed the Pentagon's announcement in 2022 that the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) found no evidence of aliens visiting Earth.
"I have not seen anything in those holdings to date that would suggest that there has been an alien visitation, an alien crash or anything like that," said Ronald Moultrie, the former Under Secretary of Defense for intelligence and security, at the time.
In January, Sean M. Kirkpatrick, the former director of the AARO who was tasked with investigating UFO sightings, said he found no evidence of alien life on Earth, despite claims of a government conspiracy to "reverse-engineer" crashed spacecraft.
'It Was Heavy and Cumbersome'
Redditor u/kirkbot told Newsweek that the unusual statue head was discovered on Sunday around noon. "It was just the head, as seen in the image," he said.
The couple initially left it where it was found "because it was heavy and cumbersome, but because of all the comments [in the Reddit post], I asked my girlfriend to go back and retrieve it."
His girlfriend later found out through her father that the riverbank where the statue head was found is close to an old house that students used as a community home many years ago. Her father had bought and renovated this old house for their family.
The Redditor said his girlfriend's father saw that they had retrieved this statue head, and "that is when he remembered and told us about the students that lived there before him."
According to the father, "One of those students used silicone molds to cast concrete sculptures, and they made this alien head. It was always just a head with no body, and it used to be painted with glow-in-the-dark fluorescent paint," the Redditor said.
"This house was so old that eventually they [the students] had to move out, and it was sold to a private citizen [his girlfriend's father] who renovated the house completely. Sometime between the students living there and the renovation, the head seems to have been lost or thrown into the river, where it remained until I found it. Because of its heavy concrete, it was never washed much further from there," the poster said.
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