Was The First Photographed UFO A Comet?

On August 12, 1883, Mexican astronomer José Bonilla was preparing to study the Sun at the recently opened Zacatecas Observatory. However, the Sun's surface was marred by numerous objects quickly travelling across its disk. Over the course of the day and the next, Bonilla exposed several wet plates to take images of the 447 objects he would observe.

They weren't released publicly until January 1st, 1886 when they were published in the magazine L'Astronomie. Since then, UFOlogists have crowned these photographs as the first photographic evidence of UFOs. The chief editor of L'Astronomie passed the observations off as migrating animals, but a new study proposes the observation was due to the breakup of a comet that nearly hit us.