We’ll believe it when we hear from the monkey. Iranian officials insisted over the weekend that they had sent a monkey into space and differences in the photographs were due to an error by the state media. Senior space official Mohammad Ebrahimi said that state media used archived photos from a monkey that died in 2011 during a launch, and “they just mixed that footage with the footage of the 2013 successful launch.” Iran had said last week that it had successfully launched into space a monkey that survived, but before photos showed a monkey with a mole, and the animal that returned did not have one, causing many to wonder if it was a hoax.
