A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:

NASA hasn’t hired theologians to study reaction to alien life

CLAIM: “NASA just hired 24 theologians to assess how the world would react if we discovered alien life.”

THE FACTS: NASA has not hired any theologians to study the potential reaction humans would have to the discovery of alien life. NASA provided some funding in 2015 to the Center of Theological Inquiry, frequently referred to as CTI, in Princeton, New Jersey, for a program to study the potential societal impact of finding life beyond Earth. The NASA-funded portion of the program ended in 2017, an agency spokesperson told The Associated Press. Claims suggesting NASA recently hired two dozen theologians for the research followed an announcement by Rev. Andrew Davison, who participated in the research, that he was publishing a book called “Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine.” Davison, of the University of Cambridge, confirmed to the AP that he was not “hired directly or paid a salary” by NASA or CTI. He said Cambridge continued to pay his salary while he participated in the program. One tweet that was shared nearly 25,000 times made the joke that the so-called NASA hires were “planting the seeds for the main storyline of 2022.” While the agency’s astrobiology program did grant money to...

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