Stephen Colbert would like a word with “science.”
The host of The Late Show playfully excoriated humanity’s greatest hope for understanding the natural world when, during Friday’s monologue, he turned his attention to the moon’s so-called “mystery hut.” That’s the shorthand used in at least one report for an unknown structure that appeared in a now-viral photo snapped by China’s Yutu 2 rover on the surface of Earth’s only natural satellite.
After poking fun at the rover’s seriously blurry photo — “Evidently the camera installed on the Chinese rover is a duct-taped baby monitor,” he quipped — Colbert dropped some truth: Scientists have a sense of what this thing might be. Colbert, citing a news report on the photo and its spread, noted that the common belief among people in the know is that it’s “a large boulder.”
“Booooo! Boo science! I say boo, sir!” Colbert shouted. “Why do you have to ruin our fun?” Why indeed. The moon may be haunted, but there aren’t any buildings on its surface (that we’ve found so far).
