Hackers Appear To Have Found Alien Life In GTA Online

GTA Online Aliens
(Image credit: Rockstar Games)

Data miners have been combing through the contents of GTA V since it released back in 2013. A lot of them have been searching for clues and evidence of the long sought after aliens that have been rumored to be in the game. Well, after years of searching it appears that they finally found what they were looking for. In this case, aliens.

Kotaku is reporting that a group named Team Guru have been mining the data from the latest Gunrunning DLC for GTA V, which featured a little something-something hidden and tucked away in the files. Doing a bit of data excavation, Team Guru discovered mission string variables that were unused in the actual GTA Online client. They decided to force the code to run by switching some variables around, enabling them to play through the hidden mission.

The Kotaku article explains that the mission involves players driving out to a location where they must steal some supplies from near a swamp. When the player(s) arrive at the location there's a giant UFO crashed into the swamp, and some alien eggs that can be recovered. The article describes the scene as various scientists and soldiers are scattered about the area, dead. However, once players take the eggs some additional aliens pop out in an attempt to stop players. The mission ends once players kill the aliens.

The mission doesn't seem all that exciting, and it seems like a basic drive-to-X-location-and-kill-things mission, which is kind of a typical and rather mundane mission script for GTA Online, far less interesting than some of the heists or other missions available in Rockstar's online open-world game, such as the actual Gunrunning missions.

Of course, Kotaku isn't sure if the reason this mission script wasn't used in the actual game is because Rockstar is still tweaking it and the script is actually part of a much larger mission event involving the UFOs. In fact, this wouldn't be all too surprising given that directly after GTA V released there were Russian data miners who dumped the Xbox 360 code into XML files and uploaded them online. It was possible to read through the mission scripts to see what Rockstar had planned for the game as far as online missions were concerned. We learned early on that the PC version would support more than 30 players online, where-as the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions were limited to 16.

Additionally, the code revealed a lot more features exclusive to the PC and eighth-gen consoles, with some of the code from the console version revealing that the PlayStation 4 version was also in the works. Most everything that appeared in the early GTA V code eventually came to pass. So there's definitely some likelihood that the whole alien thing might end up coming true at some point down the line, especially if Rockstar decided to add the mission variables into the latest DLC for GTA Online.

Then again, maybe the developers were just testing things out but there are no actual plans to include the UFOs right now? It would be a real heartbreaking thing if that turned out to be the case.

Will Usher

Staff Writer at CinemaBlend.