ST. PETERSBURG, FL — After decades of speculation, St. Petersburg officials stunned the public Tuesday by confirming that Tropicana Field — originally built as the Florida Suncoast Dome and opened in 1990 to lure a Major League Baseball franchise — was never intended to be a stadium at all, but a dormant extraterrestrial spacecraft cloaked by a joint operation with the Men in Black.

Construction on the massive dome began in the late 1980s with the goal of attracting a big-league team, eventually succeeding when the Tampa Bay Devil Rays moved in for their inaugural 1998 season.  What city leaders failed to mention until now is that the installation of Major League Baseball in 1998 was part of an elaborate cover designed to conceal the facility’s true purpose.

“Yes,” said a city spokesperson at a press conference, “it’s a ship. And we were very bad at hiding it.”

According to officials, the Men in Black assisted with memory-suppression tactics, alien-to-human interface translations, and the strategic repurposing of interior catwalks into stadium lighting rigs — originally intended for spacecraft maintenance, but later marketed as “unique MLB engineering.”

City planners admitted the cover story fell into place when MLB expanded to Tampa Bay in 1998. Local real estate developers, eager to avoid public scrutiny, enthusiastically embraced the idea of housing a franchise — convincing extraterrestrial technology it was “no big deal.”

The move worked. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays became the Tampa Bay Rays, and Tropicana Field inexplicably became home to thousands of baseball games.

Even the tin-foil-hat community, often dismissed for years, was taken by surprise when the official confirmation came.

“We knew something was up,” said one local theorist, "But we didn’t think they’d actually admit it.”

Officials emphasized that the spacecraft remains inert and poses no threat, although several unexplained phenomena — such as sudden temperature fluctuations and inexplicably bad outfield turf — were revealed to be semiactive cooling vents and docking conduits.

When asked why the truth was revealed now, city leaders cited ongoing redevelopment discussions, Hurricane damage assessments, and the fact that “this particular secret stopped being fun around 2008.”

Tropicana Field is still expected to host the Rays’ home games through the 2028 season, when the team plans to move into a new stadium. Officials guarantee the spacecraft will be deactivated and, possibly, repurposed for something boring like a community center — “although not too boring, because it actually is a spaceship.”

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