At first glance it looks like something borne from the abdominal cavity of a crew member from the spacecraft Nostromo to wreak space-horror havoc on Sigourney Weaver and the human race.

But the four-centimetre oddity was found in the Leningrad region in the town of Sosnovy Bor by a woman named Tamara as she waded in the shallows of the Kovashi River, according to a local television news report.

Tamara's friends thought the creature - which had what appears to be an elongated skull, shrunken frame and taloned limb - was a mutant chicken embryo.

But Tamara was not convinced the creature she found - and christened "Kesha" - was of such mundane origins.

The "alien" found in north-west Russia.

Biologist Yegor Zadareev at the Krasnoyarsk Institute of Biophysics agreed.

"It seems that this body is neither fish nor fowl … this creature has a mysterious skull, no neck and wings," he said according to a translation of an interview on Russian TV.

Kesha was to be sent to Moscow for further analysis, which is sufficiently vague to conjure images of top-secret underground bunker laboratories, reverse-alien probes and mitochondrial sequencing.

Kesha had alien conspiracy theorists dusting off their tin-foil hats.

The "alien corpse" discovered in Russia.

UFO Sighting Daily, whose other top stories are "UFO follows The Donald Trump Helicopter, Tells US Trump will be next President", and "City on Mars Inside Alien Skull Found In India" is eagerly awaiting the results of further tests.

But the mutant chicken embryo theory is closer to the money for Sosnovy Bor locals, the key word being "mutant".

The residents of the town, which is in the shadow of the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant, are "naturally suspicious" of expert authority, reported the Australian duo behind the Mysterious Universe podcast report, tongues firmly in cheeks.

The plant had a history of disastrous industrial accidents and cover-ups, according to a former Russian Federal Inspectorate for Nuclear and Radiation Safety, Vladimir Kuznetsov.

Three people were killed when a cooling circuit unit ruptured the year the plant opened in 1975. Over past three decades, there have been two fires, a radiation spill detected six kilometres from the site and five other major accidents at the plant.

If it is a radioactive mutant spawned from a leak at the nuclear power, that makes Kesha more Blinky the fish than a flesh-eating alien.

It's not the first time reports of a bite-sized extraterrestrial corpse has captivated the imagination of Earthlings.

Perhaps Kesha is a distant relative of Ata, the alien-like oddity discovered in a ghost town in the Atacama Desert of Chile in 2003.

The bizarre 12-centimetre-long skeleton was the star of the UFO documentary Sirius, and paraded as persuasive evidence of alien life.

That was until an immunologist had the novel idea that a rigorous scientific analysis of the specimen might hold the answers.

Screenshot of a video about an "alien" carcass found in Russia.

After mapping more than 500 million reads to a reference human genome and examining X-rays of the humanoid, Garry Nolan, an immunologist and director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute's Proteomics Centre for Systems Immunology at Stanford in California, proved Ata was of this world.

Ata was human. Possibly a 22-week-old fetus with a severe form of a rare rapid ageing disease, progeria, and died in the womb or after premature birth.

Will the same extensive analysis be carried out to determine the origins of tiny Kesha? Scientists say it could take years.

Who knows? Perhaps Kesha could become the first confirmed proof of alien humanoid life by the time president Trump takes up his second term in the White House.

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