Octopuses From Outer Space? Scientists Suggest They are "Organic Alien Material"

Study Suggests Cephalopod Eggs Traveled to Earth on a Comet.

Before I get into the details about the proposal that these eight-armed underwater creatures are from space, let's face the truth: they're pretty strange.

They've got little suction cups on their arms and they can camouflage themselves when it's time to do so.

Strangely cool, indeed.

As of late, a group of 33 scientists from respected institutions around the world are suggesting that these crafty creatures descend from organic alien material.

Their work, which is published in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, connects the rise of octopuses and their cephalopod cousins to the theory of panspermia.

In other words, they may have traveled dormant on space rocks and then onto other space rocks after collisions. Eventually, the space rock would make its way to new planets. On a habitable planet like Earth, they would wake up, thrive, and creep everyone out underwater.

"It takes little imagination to consider that the pre-Cambrian mass extinction event(s) was correlated with the impact of a giant life-bearing comet (or comets), and the subsequent seeding of Earth with new cosmic-derived cellular organisms and viral genes."

However, this is only a theory and they don't have any hard evidence.

Astrobiologist Frances Westall, who works with the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission, isn't really buying the idea. She told Newsweek, "Some microbial cells and seeds have been shown to survive in space for certain periods of time. But in the scenario offered in this paper, they would need to have survived for thousands of years."

Unfortunately, it is all too easy to pull information out of the literature to support one's hypothesis," Westall added. "Nature is incredible, and I do not think it is necessary to call on extraterrestrials to explain it."

For now, an octopus remains "terrestrial" but I'd like to think they came cruisin' down on a flaming asteroid, collided into the ocean, and then started swingin' those arms like crazy.