Claims of signs of life on Venus by a respected Russian scientist have been debunked by experts who said that features seen on pictures from Soviet probe were, in fact, an assortment of camera lens covers and imge blurs.

Russian news service RIA Novosti has reported that Leonid Ksanfomaliti, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences who worked on unmanned Soviet missions to Venus during the 70s and 80s, has called attention to several objects, including an object shaped somewhat like a crab, photographed by the Venera 13 probe which landed on Venus in 1982.

However, a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, Jonathon Hill, said that higher-resolution versions of the Venera 13 images show that the crab-like object is actually a mechanical component, not a living creature.
The same object shows up in a photograph taken by an identical landing probe, Venera 14, which landed nearby on Venus.

"If those objects were already on the surface of Venus, what are the chances that Venera 13 and 14, which landed nearly 1,000 kilometers apart, would both land inches away from the only ones in sight and they would be in the same positions relative to the spacecraft? It makes much more sense that it's a piece of the lander designed to break off during the deployment of one of the scientific instruments," Hill said.

Ted Stryk, a photo editor who reprocesses and enhances many NASA and Soviet space program images, supports Hill's statement. He noted that the half circle components are camera lens covers, and the reason why they appear to be in different places in the two photos is because Venera-13 had two cameras.

"Venera-13 had two cameras, one in front and one in back. The one image shows the front camera lens cap and the other shows the rear camera lens cap, not one lens cap that moved," said Stryk.

The other photograph which supposedly shows a scorpionlike creature, contains a blur. "The features that Ksanfomaliti shows are nothing more than processed noise, at best, in some particularly bad versions of the images. They are not in the original data," he added.