Hardly related: I've heard the phrase 'Scientists discover octopus brains are alien' said out loud several times in the past few days.

Apparently some clickbait site has picked up this article (or the paper), mangled it, and spewed it onto the feeds of more than one of my non-technical friends.

So, 'Strange' --> 'Alien' --> 'Extraterrestrial'. The word 'alien' does appear in the text of the Economist article.