A UFO expert claimed that NASA’s photo of Mercury showed a massive alien tower in one of the planet’s craters. Aside from the tower, the UFO expert also spotted a statue in the photo.

The claims regarding the alien tower and statue on Mercury were made by self-proclaimed UFO expert Scott Warring of ET Data Base. According to Waring, he saw the photo while browsing through Arizona State University’s Space Exploration Resources website.

This site contains various photos taken NASA during its missions involving Mars, the Moon and the asteroid 433 Eros. It also features photos taken by the space agency during its Mariner 10 mission launched in 1973.

For the mission, NASA launched a robotic space probe to study the atmospheric conditions and other characteristics of Mercury and Venus. During the course of the mission, which lasted for about a year and four months, the Mariner 10 probe took various photos of the alien planets from orbit.

One particular photo that caught Waring’s attention was that of a crater on Mercury. After closely examining the image, the UFO expert claimed that he saw a towering structure somewhere near the middle of the crater.

Based on the size of the crater, which Waring estimated to be about 10 kilometers long, the structure could be about 3 kilometers tall. Aside from the tower-like object, Waring also spotted another structure in the photo.

Located left of the tower was a structure that resembled a statue of an individual in a praying position. This led Waring to believe that the tower and statue may have had a religious significance for the alien beings that built and used them.

He noted that the structures may have served as a temple for the extraterrestrial beings or a station for alien vessels.

“There is also a huge statue of a person praying in the left side of the photograph,” Waring wrote in a blog post. “This could mean that the tower we see is of religious significance to the alien species that created it. The tower could also be a docking point for [ships] too large to land [on the] planet’s surface.”

Mercury NASA has shared an image of a stunning impact crater on Mercury. Pictured: In this handout from NASA, the surface of Mercury is seen in a picture taken by NASA's Messenger spacecraft as it approached the planet January 14, 2008. The image was taken from about 11,000 miles from the planet and shows a region 300 miles across. Photo: Getty Images/NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington