It looked like a scene pulled from Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds remake. Alien potatoes sprouted giant red tentacles to overtake one terrified woman's pantry. They don't appear to be life threatening, but once the young lady posted her find on social media, the images of these mutant spuds went viral.

22-year old Donna Porée was horrified to discover that a bag of potatoes she'd purchased had grown out of control. She'd been away from her home for three months, spending lockdown at her boyfriend's pad. Returning, she found that the tubular taters had grown out of control, making her home look like a scene pulled from a bad B movie.

The tentacles are perhaps the most shocking aspect of these out of control potatoes. Some had grown several feet long, and their red appearance is strikingly similar to the red weed from Mars originally conceived by H. G. Wells.

The bag of spuds had been purchased in March. Donna had every intention of cooking them for dinner. But she left them behind once lockdown restrictions were announced, forgetting to take them to her boyfriend's house. The communications manager had this to say about her discovery.

"As I opened the front door, I noticed a strange shape at the back of the kitchen. As the light was off and shutters down, I didn't realize it was the potatoes. It was only after opening the shutters that I took note of this extraordinary sight. I was terrified at first, but after realizing what it was I laughed a lot and shared a video of the plant on Snapchat. My friends couldn't stop laughing. They found the whole situation unbelievable."

As you can read, once the scary sight set in, it became more of a joke than something to be terrified of. The crazy thing is that the tentacles tore through the seal attaching Donna's kitchen worktops, growing strong through plastic, spreading across the wall.

It took several hours to remove the invasive plant, which seemed to have a mind of its own. Posting the find on social media, Donna racked up 195K likes and 61K retweets, turning this sight into a viral saga. It's not quite the alien invasion many have been envisioning for 2020, but it's a good tester point.

The experience has not turned Donna off potatoes, and she plans to keep eating them. She even took the wayward tentacles and planted them in her small garden, hoping they turn into edible taters. She goes onto say this.

"I wanted to extract the bag of potatoes from the counter-top seals, but it wasn't easy. The shoots had fixed in place in the joints and were difficult to remove. I ended up having to cut some of the shoots out with scissors and I had to fill in the holes they made. I replanted the potatoes in my vegetable patch and today they're growing once again. I'm eager to see what will come out of the ground."

Donna Porée was the first to share her images on social media. The Sun brings additional quotes from the incident.