I was pretty excited on this morning, it’s not every day that I get to discover alien life right here on our own planet! As soon as I saw this sea star, it was so much larger than the other stars, with so many more legs, that I knew it was from out of this world.

I set my tripod into the soft sand but I could hear a voice in my head telling me not to take the picture. I picked up my tripod and began to walk away before I rejected the star’s mind control and reset the tripod onto the wet beach. Sadly, when I got back home from my trip to Redwood National Park, I discovered that this is not a newly discovered star from the stars, but rather an already discovered terrestrial variety with latent Jedi powers.

Like the ochre sea star, the sunflower sea star also comes in shades of red, orange, and the purple seen here. With a few of the legs upturned, you can see the tube feet that let the stars grip the rocks on the beach, move about the tide pool, and grip their prey. At the time I thought it was sitting still, but looking at the pictures when I got home I could see it was slowly moving its legs.

I’m lucky I escaped with my life.