'Proof' of UFO Coverup Has Conspiracy Theorists Going Wild, but It's Really Just a Meteor

A group of space conspiracy theorists alleged this week that authorities may be covering up the truth about an object recently caught on film near Earth.

Secureteam, which calls itself "the fastest-growing research outlet and source for data on the alien phenomenon, UFOs and the exposure of those covering them up," on Sunday put a video on its 1.1 million-subscriber YouTube channel, Secureteam10, about a clip recently released by Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli. Shot from the International Space Station (ISS), the time-lapse clip showed a light near Earth that the European Space Agency quickly identified as a meteor.

Related: Fireball meteor seen from space: ISS astronaut shares incredible footage of shooting star

Secureteam didn't buy that explanation.

In the YouTube video, Secureteam creator Tyler Glockner said it's suspicious that the ESA publicly discussed the video so quickly. He argued that the footage doesn't match up with a previous ISS photo of a shooting star released in 2011.

"It was almost as if that they [the ESA] had found something and that they knew other people were going to discover it and so they just went ahead very quickly and called all of these other media companies and said, 'Do this story: We've captured a...meteor entering Earth's atmosphere,'" Glockner added.

He said he's skeptical of other claims about the object, too, including its speed—an ESA expert noted in a blog post that the meteor was moving "actually quite fast," at about 40 kilometers per second, as opposed to a normal speed of 20. Glockner rebutted another expert's comment about how the object could have been space debris by asking why, if that was true, authorities didn't attempt to recover it.

"The more I looked at it—and I took a close view of this thing—I realized that whatever this object is, I think there's a good chance it may not be a meteor at all," he said.

Glockner didn't explicitly suggest that the object was alien, but the Secureteam is known for videos like, "NASA CUTS LIVE SPACE FEED! HD UFO APPEARS AT ISS 2014" and "ASTRONAUT BUSTED Trying To Hide UFOs Near ISS!"

Even so, the viral clip has triggered pushback from people like Nigel Watson, who wrote a book on UFOs. Watson told the British tabloid Metrothat "even if it was debris, it doesn't turn it into a extraterrestrial scout ship filled with tentacled aliens on a mission to invade our planet, which is what SecureTeam10 imagines every time they see a blob of light filmed by NASA cameras."

Believe what you will.