Russian Scientist: Life Spotted on Venus, a 40-Year Saga

In the scorched, crushing hellscape of Venus – a world where lead would melt like butter and pressures rival the deepest ocean trenches – humanity’s robotic envoys have long whispered tantalizing riddles. Fast-forward to 1982: the Soviet Union’s Venera-13 lander, a titanium-clad survivor, beamed back the first-ever color photographs from another planet’s surface. Amid the rusty plains and howling winds, faint anomalies flickered into view – shapes that danced, shifted, and vanished. Decades later, as new spectral signatures from Venus’s clouds stir fresh debates about microbial life, these ghostly images remind us: the second rock from the Sun refuses to yield its secrets easily.

The Venera-13 Triumph: A Probe’s Fiery 127 Minutes

Launched on October 30, 1981, as part of the storied Venera program – the USSR’s audacious bid to conquer the solar system’s most inhospitable world – Venera-13 and its twin, Venera-14, pierced Venus’s thick veil of sulfuric acid clouds after a 124-day journey. On March 1, 1982, Venera-13 touched down in Phoebe Regio, a volcanic highland pocked with pancake domes and fractured basalt, enduring surface temperatures of 462°C (864°F) and atmospheric pressure 92 times Earth’s.

Engineers designed the lander like a deep-sea submersible: a spherical pressure vessel wrapped in cooling fins and thermal blankets, powered by silver-zinc batteries that granted it a mere 127 minutes of life – a record for Venus surface ops. In that blink, it achieved miracles: deploying a soil sampler that drilled 40 cm deep (snagging a bit of Venusian regolith laced with potassium and aluminum), measuring wind speeds up to 1.5 m/s, and snapping two panoramic color mosaics – vivid oranges and browns revealing a barren, wind-eroded landscape under a hazy, ochre sky. Venera-13 even detected a gamma-ray burst, hinting at cosmic fireworks far beyond the clouds.

But as the probe’s cameras panned – stitching 23 images per panorama from front and rear lenses – something extraordinary emerged in the grainy frames.

Phantoms in the Dust: The ‘Creatures’ of Phoebe Regio

Enter Leonid Ksanfomaliti, a veteran planetary physicist at Moscow’s Space Research Institute, who had contributed instruments to the Venera fleet. In a 2012 paper published in Solar System Research (the English translation of Russia’s Astronomichesky Vestnik), the then-75-year-old revisited the digitized Venera-13 archives, applying modern image enhancement to the faded negatives.

What he found chilled and thrilled: five anomalous objects, captured across photos taken just 26 minutes apart, appearing to “emerge, fluctuate, and disappear.” One resembled a “disk” or jellyfish, hovering 20 cm above the soil before sinking and leaving a depression. Another, a “black flap” or “hat,” flapped into view like a discarded parasol. Most striking: a “scorpion” – a 20-cm appendage with a tail, scuttling from frame left to right, trailing a groove in the regolith as if dragging its body.

Ksanfomaliti, no stranger to Venus’s vitriolic chemistry (he’d studied its ionosphere for decades), didn’t claim proof. Instead, he mused poetically: “What if we forget about the current theories about the nonexistence of life on Venus? Let’s boldly suggest that the objects’ morphological features would allow us to say that they are living.” He likened them to extremophiles on Earth – tardigrades thriving in boiling vents or bacteria in acidic brines – proposing Venus’s surface might harbor silicon-based or radiation-hardened biota, adapted to the inferno.

Then again, here is a close-up of an object resembling living being: a scorpion (Dr. Leonid Ksanfomality / Astronomicheskii Vestnik)

The paper ignited global headlines, from RIA Novosti’s “Life Spotted on Venus” to breathless tabloids dubbing it the “Scorpion of Venus.” Ksanfomaliti, who passed away in 2019 at 82, stood by his hypothesis in interviews, arguing the movements defied wind or erosion explanations.

The Cold Splash: Artifacts, Not Aliens

Skeptics pounced swiftly. NASA’s Venus experts, poring over the originals, identified the “scorpion” as a discarded lens cap from the lander’s camera – a mundane ejection artifact, its “tail” a shadow or dust trail. The “disk” and “flap”? Likely camera debris or thermal distortions in the photos, exacerbated by the probe’s failing electronics as batteries waned. Planetary Society analysts noted the “movements” aligned with slight camera tilts during panning, not biological locomotion.

Even Russian colleagues, like Venera veteran Donald Mitchell, penned rebuttals, praising Ksanfomaliti’s rigor but attributing the shapes to “technical artifacts.” No soil samples showed organic traces; spectrometers detected only basaltic rock and sulfur compounds. Venus’s surface, a pressure-cooked cauldron of CO2 and trace toxins, remains a biological dead zone – or so consensus holds.

Yet Ksanfomaliti’s bold reanalysis endures as a testament to scientific curiosity, echoing Carl Sagan’s mantra: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” It also spotlights Venus’s overlooked allure – a “twin” to Earth in size, but twisted into a runaway greenhouse nightmare by volcanic outgassing eons ago.

Clouds of Possibility: Phosphine and the New Venus Renaissance

If the surface scorches away life’s chances, what of the skies? Venus’s upper clouds – 48-60 km up, a balmy 30°C with Earth-like pressure – harbor droplets of concentrated sulfuric acid, but also fleeting hints of habitability. In 2020, the James Webb Space Telescope and ground observatories detected phosphine (PH3), a gas produced on Earth solely by anaerobic microbes. Detections wavered amid calibration debates, but by mid-2024, separate teams confirmed phosphine alongside ammonia (NH3) – another potential biosignature, neutralizing acid droplets and suggesting metabolic processes aloft.

As of September 2025, the intrigue deepens: A UK-led probe, EnVision (ESA, launch 2031), will map cloud chemistry, while NASA’s DAVINCI (2029) dives a probe through the atmosphere, sampling for organics. VERITAS will radar-map the surface, hunting volcanic hotspots that could feed aerial ecosystems. Private ventures, like Rocket Lab’s 2025 cloud-skimmer, aim to snag samples mid-flight.

Astronomers now peg life’s odds in Venus’s clouds at 10-20%, per recent models – a far cry from Ksanfomaliti’s surface scorpions, but a nod to his spirit of wonder. Non-biological sources? Volcanic phosphides or unknown photochemistry remain contenders, but the debate fuels a Venus boom – over a dozen missions slated by 2035.

AI Generated Fake Scopion on Venus, for Fun

This is not real, but it is an example of what you might expect to see with unambigious large life on Venus.

Echoes from the Inferno: Why Venus Still Beckons

Ksanfomaliti’s “creatures” may prove mere mirages in pixel dust, but they humanize the hunt for cosmic company. In an era of exoplanet deluges and Mars rovers, Venus – our scorched sibling – challenges us to rethink life’s limits. From 1982’s fleeting frames to 2025’s spectral whispers, the planet’s phantoms persist, urging bolder gazes into the abyss. As one X user quipped in a recent thread, “If Venus hides scorpions, what else lurks in the clouds?” The answer? Only time – and more probes – will tell.