Is This Our First Alien Encounter?

By Chris Taylor on September 19th, 2013 on mashable.com

Bet you never thought ET would look like this — or that we'd find him hitching a ride on a weather balloon.

But that is exactly what a team from the University of Sheffield says happened, according to a new paper in the Journal of Cosmology. Professor Milton Wainright launched a balloon with special sterile studs that would only deploy when it reached the stratosphere, then retract on the way down.