Claim:
Scientists discovered robotic alien spiders from interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on Earth’s polar ice sheets in October 2025.
Rating:
In October 2025, a Facebook post (archived) about an unusual finding spread across the platform. According to the post, scientists discovered robotic micro spiders from the comet 3I/ATLAS in Antarctica. The spiders, which apparently detached from the comet “during its closest pass to our planet,” were purportedly gathering data from the ice and transmitting the data to space.
The post was reshared by other Facebook pages (archived) soon after it was originally posted. Some people emailed Snopes to ask if the claim was true or searched the website to find out the same.
There was no evidence to support any of the details in the story shared in the posts. Therefore, we’re rating this claim as false.
Snopes searched for “robot spiders 3I/ATLAS” on Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and Yahoo. There were no results outside of the social media posts related to the claim across any of the search engines. If this story, which the Facebook post described as “sending global shockwaves,” was real, mainstream news outlets would have covered it and there’d likely be some kind of scientific publication or update released about it.
In fact, the details of the story simply don’t add up.
The Facebook post said scientists proposed that the spiders “detached” from the comet during its closest pass to Earth, but that actually hasn’t happened yet. 3I/ATLAS’ closest approach to Earth won’t be until Dec. 19, 2025, according to the European Space Agency. An animation produced by NASA showed the sun was partially or fully between Earth and 3I/ATLAS for much of the time since the comet’s discovery.
The image attached to the story wasn’t real either. Although the location was described as Antarctica, the Northern Lights — which don’t appear around the South Pole — could be seen in the sky at the top left. Additionally, the “spiders” in the image had varying amounts of legs and the inset image of the “spider” differed from the spiders seen in the larger image. These inconsistencies suggest the image was likely AI-generated.
Space Lane, the page that posted the story, frequently posts fabricated stories suggesting contact with or discovery of extraterrestrial life. Many of these posts reference 3I/ATLAS, a comet that originated from outside of the solar system and was discovered in 2025.
Snopes previously fact-checked a claim that 3I/ATLAS was “most likely” an alien ship heading for Earth.
