Did Iran Really Launch a Monkey Into Space? Iranian space
officials announced Monday (Jan. 28, 2013) that they have
successfully launched a live monkey into space. CREDIT: Iran
State TV/Powered by NewsLook Soon after Iranian officials
announced they'd sent a monkey to space, close observers started
wondering if the Iranians had been, as the saying goes, just
monkeying around. Photos published by the official state media
ahead of the space monkey launch showed a distinctive monkey
with a mole above its right eye. Yet footage of the creature
after it had returned from its flight seemed to picture another
monkey altogether, one without a mole, with darker fur, and with
a changed facial structure and nose shape. "It looks like a very
different monkey, the nose, the features, everything is
different," Yariv Bash, founder and CEO of Space Israel, a non-
profit Israeli space organization, told the U.K.'s Telegraph
newspaper. "This means that either the original monkey died from
a heart attack after the rocket landed