A huge asteroid which sailed safely past Earth had an unusual hitchhiker - which internet conspiracy fans claim is clearly an alien spacecraft.

The tiny, disc-like object was observed using a massive radar array, NASA’s Deep Space Network in Goldstone California.

Tireless alien hunter Scott C Waring of UFO Sightings Daily says, ‘Below, you see the close up view of the UFO that is orbiting asteroid 2004 BL86 right now. The UFO is 70 meters long. They call the UFO a small moon, but its not.

‘As you see from the focused photos below, The UFO has a long metallic cylinder hull and two more smaller cylinder sections on opposite sides. The UFO is spinning, which gives us a great view of it from different angles as you see below. It came 750, 000 miles from Earth.

There are a couple of problems with this sighting, though - one of which is that alien-hunters are touting it as happening this year, when in fact it happened on January 27 in 2015.



The asteroid is not expected to make such a close pass again for the next 200 years.

NASA’s own explanation is a little more down to Earth.

NASA said (last year) that the radar images showed that asteroid 2004 BL86 had its own moon, saying that such moons are actually quite common.

‘In the near-Earth population, about 16 percent of asteroids that are about 655 feet or larger are a binary (the primary asteroid with a smaller asteroid moon orbiting it) or even triple systems (two moons),’ the space agency said.