It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Murphy Lee’s surveillance drone!

Footage of a mysterious light hovering near the Gateway Arch in St. Louis has everyone guessing.

OK, no one suggested it was Murphy Lee’s drone. Or a bird. Some “reasonable” people have suggested it’s a regular drone with a unidirectional light on it, Fox News reports, but everyone who’s anyone thinks its an alien life form come to visit our nation’s…60th biggest city. The footage, from surveillance cameras at Malcolm W. Martin Memorial Park, is indeed pretty spooky, and another daytime video with another strange flash of light has upped the ante even more.

Since we can’t identify what it is, let’s just say it’s aliens.

Except another report out this week makes it seem like we’re never going to meet any aliens, which isn’t fun at all. A Harvard University paper published in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, via Gizmodo, suggests that life might be possible on planets that orbit stars much smaller and weaker than our own Sun. If that’s the case, “the universe is likely to be much more habitable in the distant future than it is today,” meaning it’s far less likely we’d find and run into some intergalactic neighbors now than then.

“If you allow low mass stars to have life, just like we find here on Earth,” said the study’s author, “Then the probability of life emerging in the future 10 trillion years from now is one thousand times bigger to find life.”

Of course, other reasons we haven’t found life yet are that we’ve barely explored the universe at all, and maybe we wouldn’t even understand what we’d found if we did find it. So there’s that.

Now that I think about it, aliens definitely would have come to visit The Lou when the St. Lunatics were at the top of their game. So this was probably a drone.