SPACE (DS) -- Just days after canceling a space walk due to an unexplained illness, a German astronaut insists that not only is he feeling fine, but he absolutely is not carrying some sort of hideous alien spore like in that Outer Limits episode or in The Astronaut's Wife or in that other Outer Limits episode.

NASA has refused to comment on what type of hive-mind sentient virus the astronaut apparently doesn't have, despite repeated requests from this reporter via both email and unsolicited badgering. "For the last time, that's ridiculous! We didn't release what he was sick with for basic medical privacy reasons, not because of any sort of pod person or Venom from Spiderman type issue. I assure you that if his body were now nothing more than an elaborate food store and gestation tub for some hideous Geiger-esque alien horror, the other astronauts would let us know," explained NASA press liaison Jim Clayburn. Asked about how they would know if the other astronauts were also compromised, Clayburn expressed that he didn't have an immediate answer but that he'd go rent a few tapes from Blockbuster and see what he could come up with.

Asked to shed some light on the situation, Hans Schlegel, the fifty-six-year-old astronaut in question, promised that his memory was absolutely intact and that he wasn't experiencing anything remotely like that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with the weird bug things that live in your neck but can't access your memories or the episode of Stargate SG-1 where it turns out the little Russian kid was actually an alien the whole time.