James Franco fans have plunged into a spiral of conspiracy theories about space aliens thanks to his bizarre new TikTok videos.The 48-year-old actor is navigating a return to the spotlight after his Hollywood career was torpedoed by a string of Me Too allegations he assiduously denied.At the start of this month he made his TikTok debut, posting a string of videos of himself unshaven, wearing a torn t-shirt and claiming a creature with ‘glowing eyes’ that was neither human nor animal was lurking in his garage.Expressing fears he was under surveillance, he vowed to film his garage and prove his story to his fans, but no such evidence has yet materialized.Eagle-eyed social media users began obsessively scanning the details of Franco’s TikToks in an attempt to discern their hidden meaning.Now an X user has put together a compendium of the eye-catching nuggets, from a possible code in Franco’s handle to the design of his bedraggled t-shirt. James Franco fans have plunged into a spiral of conspiracy theories about space aliens thanks to his bizarre new TikTok videos A frantic James Franco claimed he saw an alien in his garage in a series of paranoid videos which have caused alarm and confusionWriting in Portuguese, the X user noted that fans have been particularly taken with the fact that the actor’s handle is @jamesfranco2319.In the classic Pixar film Monster’s, Inc, the code 2319 indicates a monster has come into ‘contact with something human or “contaminant,”‘ the X user observed.Franco himself has propounded the notion that the ‘non-human’ in his garage is an extra-terrestrial, blaring in the caption of one TikTok: ‘It’s an ALIEN!!!!’ According to the X user, his belief ‘recalls several classic ufology themes: silent presence; surveillance; fear of revealing information; gradual contact.’The subject then turned to his tattered t-shirt, which he wore in several of his TikToks, pouring fuel on the idea it might have some symbolic meaning.Franco had scrawled the words ‘BRUCE ROBINSON’ in black ink across the shirt and placed two vertical strips of yellow tape side by side on the fabric.Among the theories about the design is that ‘Bruce Robinson’ could be either a ‘real person connected to the story,’ ‘an anagram, code, or clue for a future revelation’ or merely ‘an element of a viral campaign.’At the time when he was posting TikToks about his garage, Franco followed only two other TIkTok accounts – the official page of his upcoming movie Love Meets in the Sunshine and that of its director Christian Guiton. Franco’s head-turning entree to TikTok comes after he returned to the Cannes Film Festival with Pazkad for the premiere of the French movie The Electric Kiss Guiton quickly moved to put the kibosh on the rumors that Franco’s TikToks were part of an elaborate marketing campaign for their film.’It’s not a science fiction movie,’ Guiton said on TikTok. ‘It’s not a conspiracy movie. If I was promoting Sunshine, this is not how we would do it.’Nevertheless the X user who compiled the swarm of online theories argued that the TikToks ‘seem like pieces of a planned puzzle.’ In his TikToks, Franco wrote his handle on a piece of paper to demonstrate to viewers that they were watching the real him and not an AI-generated facsimile.The Pineapple Express star insisted he was not ‘promoting anything’ but was merely posting to warn his fans that ‘some serious s**t is going on, okay?’One video saw him point out his garage, which is ‘where I paint. I was going out there, it was night. I was going to do night painting and I go inside and before I even turned the light on, I heard something, I thought it was an animal or something like that. And it wasn’t, it wasn’t a raccoon…. I saw eyes, I saw glowing eyes and hand.’In early 2018, at the height of the Me Too movement, Franco’s career went up in flames when five women – four of whom were students at his film school Studio 4 – accused him of inappropriate sexual behavior towards them.One woman who dated Franco claimed he exposed himself to her in a car and began ‘nudging’ her head towards his crotch until she performed fellatio on him because she ‘just didn’t want him to hate me,’ in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. He made his grand post-Me Too return to Cannes in 2024 (pictured) and is there this year promoting his upcoming action thriller Foster, also featuring Ron PerlmanThe allegations escalated into a lawsuit, which Franco eventually settled after staunchly denying the claims through his attorney.He became persona non grata in Hollywood and was publicly denounced by his former close friend and frequent collaborator Seth Rogen. In a 2021 interview he confessed that he ‘did sleep with students, and that was wrong,’ but maintained the sexual encounters were consensual.Franco added that he could ‘never be faithful to anybody’ prior to his relationship to Isabel Pakzad, whom he has been involved with since 2017.He contended that after he quit drinking as a teenager, he developed a sex addiction, which he described as a ‘powerful drug’ he was ‘hooked on’ for two decades, in an appearance on The Jess Cagle Podcast with Julia Cunningham.’The insidious part of that is that I stayed sober from alcohol all that time,’ added the onetime Oscars host: ‘and I went to meetings all that time. I even tried to sponsor other people. So in my head, it was like: “Oh, I’m sober. I’m living a spiritual life,” where on the side, I’m acting out now in all these other ways, and I couldn’t see it.’Franco’s head-turning entree to TikTok comes after he returned to the Cannes Film Festival with Pazkad for the premiere of the French movie The Electric Kiss.He made his grand post-Me Too return to Cannes in 2024 and is there this year promoting his upcoming action thriller Foster, also featuring Ron Perlman.While at the festival, he remarked that he has finally made his first ‘big studio movie’ since his 2017 release The Disaster Artist, according Deadline.Franco kept details of the new project private but let slip that ‘it won’t be ready for this summer, but my guess is it will be end of this year or spring-summer 2027.’At the moment he has a number of films in the pipeline, including a picture called Castro’s Daughter, in which he has been cast as the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and the biopic Golden State Killer starring Vincent Gallo as the titular serial murderer.