"Earth must be warned," screamed Claudie Haigneré, 59, France's first female astronaut and the first European woman on the International Space Station.
She then had to "be restrained" after she screamed, and fell unconscious after an overdose of sleeping pills, it is reported by a computer-generated voice. She tried to commit suicide.
In a flash, a number of conspiracy theory websites published the strange video which beamed the warning.
But recently, for the first time, Dr Haignere explained what she meant by the statement. She said it was:
"Nothing." Because it never happened. It was "nothing more than a hoax," she explained.
She said to Express.co.uk: "Thank you for asking me to comment. All there is to say is that it's a complete hoax, nothing else."
Created by YouTube channel UFOmania, the video has been reposted on the social media and then spread rapidly across various forums.
The reason her video was respected so much was that Claudie Haigneré was an astronaut, a member of the backup crew for the 1993 Mir Altaïr mission. She was travelling with Jean-Pierre Haigneré, who she would later marry when she travelled to the ISS in 2001.
The asteroid 135268 Haigneré is named after Claudie and her husband.
Later, she became the French minister delegate for research and new technologies from 2002 to 2004. Then she was employed in a biology lab at the Pasteur Institute when she tried to kill herself in December 2008.
The incident was immediately picked up by alien conspiracy theorists, who were sure that she was trying to issue a warning to the world regarding a threat from aliens. The lab too was strangely burnt down by an unknown person.
The voice in the video says: "She had to be forcefully restrained after screaming 'Earth must be warned! More ominously, her laboratory where she worked at the forefront of human/alien DNA research was destroyed by fire."
However, she was never involved in "human-alien DNA research". Officially, Haigneré said that she just underwent a "burnout syndrome". This is a "state of emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress."
After that, she has never talked about aliens at all, it is reported.
She took over directorship of the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie and is currently employed in the European Space Agency.
