In the vast hall of the cosmic masquerade, quasars are the most skilled actors. They don other costumes, change their makeup, and pass themselves off as something they are not. Two such impostors caught astronomers' eyes: both claimed to be gravitationally lensed quasars in the early universe, but scrutiny unmasked them.

The first object, J0109–5424, looked like a quasar at the edge of the observable universe: its spectrum showed a sharp break resembling a Lyman break — a sign of immense distance. But JWST/NIRSpec spectra revealed that this break was not due to distance but to iron absorption lines. We are looking at a FeLoBAL quasar — a quasar with powerful winds ejecting gas at 2500 km/s. Its redshift is 2.07, not 6. The masquerade is over.

The second object, P170+20, proved even trickier. In the HST image, a point source is visible 0.09 arcseconds from the quasar. Initially, it was thought to be a lensing galaxy. But Gemini and LBT spectra are best described by the sum of a quasar and an ultracool dwarf — a faint, cool star. The probability of a chance alignment is 4%. Low, but not zero. This might not be a lens but simply two objects that happen to lie along the same line of sight.

So the cosmic masquerade continues. Quasars don the costumes of distant objects, and astronomers learn to see through their tricks. Each unmasked impostor makes future searches for true lenses cleaner and more precise. After all, among hundreds of quasars at z>5.5, only one is confirmed as lensed, and it awaits discovery without its mask.