Mysterious twin towers positioned on either side of a crater on the moon caught the attention of alien hunters and UFO watchers in January, as they place the seemingly massive towers in the category of “alien artifacts.” But what are these two objects, really? Do they even exist, or are they just a trick of the light in an amateur moon photograph.

Here is what backyard astronomer Jay Lee had to say about his unusual find, when he posted a video compilation of his moon tower images on YouTube on January 10. The images themselves were snapped three days earlier.

“2 days after full moon. Captured footage with 12″ Meade LX (no motor). Celestron zoom. Captured with Alpha 6000 at 60fps. Comes with a few fun moon facts. This looks like a huge megalith outside a football stadium. Just having fun looking at the moon.”

The video of the moon tower images is viewable above.

Lee appears to be making no extraordinary claims for his anomalous find. The two towers are visible in the below screen capture from Lee’s YouTube image compilation. Note the crater at the center of the image, which appears to have two large, monument-like objects jutting skyward — one on each edge of the crater.

The amateur astronomer provided no information about which lunar crater appears in his photographs, or even at which portion of the moon he aimed his telescopic camera.

Prominent internet UFOlogist Scott Waring, of the popular UFO Sightings Daily blog, seems certain that the two towers originate with some long-dead alien civilization on the moon — which many astronomers consider to be its own actual planet, rather than a “moon,” due to its large size and the fact that the moon does not actually orbit the Earth, but rather the two celestial bodies orbit each other around a point in space called a “barycenter.”

“An astronomer was looking at the moon and was fortunate enough to catch these two towers on the edge of a crater,” Waring wrote on Sunday. “There are a lot of alien artifacts on the moon. That much I promise, but many are difficult to see, but can be seen if you have an infrared camera looking through a scope. This guy doesn’t, but still caught some megaliths. If you have an IR camera, please check out the moon sometime. You will be blown away.”

Waring zoomed in on the twin “towers” in the moon photograph.

A commenter on Waring’s site, however, wrote that the crater is identified as Cleomedes and that the towers are “an illusion, created by some well mapped features; at other times of the month when the lighting conditions are different, their origins are more clear.”

But the apparent discovery is far from the first time that strange objets have been sighted in photos taken from the moon. Nor is this the first time towers have been discovered on the moon. Alien hunters have long been captivated by an object known as “The Shard,” photographed by a NASA lunar orbiter in 1967, seen slightly above the center point of this famous photograph.

The supposed moon tower called The Shard is believed to reach a full mile above the lunar surface — which would make it more than twice as tall as the Burj Khalifa building in Dubai, the tallest man-made structure on this planet.