News: Claim of alien cells in rain may fit historical accounts - study

Claim of alien cells in rain may fit historical accounts: study

Jan. 22, 2008
Special to World Science

A controversial theory, that strange red rains in India six years ago might
have contained microbes from outer space, hasn't died.

In fact, things might be getting even weirder.

A new study suggests the claimed connection between scarlet rain and tiny
celestial visitors may be consistent with historical accounts linking
colored rain to meteor passings. These would seem to echo the India case, in
which organisms are proposed to have fallen out of a breaking meteor.

"Some of these [past] accounts may have been exaggerated," cautioned the new
study's author in reporting his findings, adding that considerable problems
also dog the alien-cell proposal.

Yet the historical analysis, he concluded, shows the question is "much more
complex than one might have expected" and "should be investigated with every
scientific resource" available.

The study, by doctoral student Patrick McCafferty of Queen's University
Belfast, is published in the advance online edition of the International
Journal of Astrobiology.

McCafferty analyzed, as he wrote, "80 accounts of red rain, another 20
references to lakes and rivers turning blood-red, and 68 examples of other
phenomena such as coloured rain, black rain, milk, bricks, or honey falling
from the sky."

Sixty of these events, or 36 percent, "were linked to meteoritic or cometary
activity," he went on. But not always strongly. Sometimes, "the fall of red
rain seems to have occurred after an airburst," as from a meteor exploding
in air; other times the odd rainfall "is merely recorded in the same year as
a stone-fall or the appearance of a comet."

The phenomena were recorded in times and places as varied as Classical Rome,
medieval Ireland, Norman Britain and 19th century California, noted
McCafferty, who has a master's degree in archaeology and studies Irish myth
and astronomy. McCafferty added that tales suggestive of red rain-meteor
links also crop up in myth.

With witnesses to past events all long dead, McCafferty wrote that probably
no historical analysis will ever settle the debate over the 2001 rainfalls
in India.

Research claiming to connect these rains to extraterrestrial life provoked
disbelief when they were first reported widely, in World Science. "I really,
really don't think they are from a meteor!" wrote Harvard University
biologist Jack Szostak, referring to cell-like particles that had been
reported to permeate the collected rainwater.

The curious events began on July 25, 2001, when residents of Kerala, a
region in southwestern India, started seeing scarlet rain in some areas. It
persisted on-and-off for some weeks, even two months. Scientists couldn't
identify the cell-like specks that gave the water its scarlet hue.
Speculation of possible extraterrestrial origins began.

Two Indian scientists later published a chemical and biological analysis
suggesting, they said, that the specks might indeed be little aliens. They
"have much similarity with biological cells" but without DNA, wrote the
researchers, Godfrey Louis and A. Santhosh Kumar of India's Mahatma Gandhi
University. "Are these cell-like particles a kind of alternate life from
space?"

They cited newspaper reports that a meteor broke up in the atmosphere hours
before the red rain. Louis and Kumar's research paper appeared in the April
4, 2006 online edition of the research journal Astrophysics and Space
Science. In previous, unpublished papers, the pair also claimed the
particles could reproduce in extreme heat.

Some researchers, including Chandra Wickramasinghe, director of the Centre
for Astrobiology at Cardiff University, U.K., have said that Louis and
Kumar's idea may well be correct. He and other supporters pointed to the
consistency of the alien-cell hypothesis with the popular "panspermia"
theory, which holds that meteors and comets might have seeded life
throughout many planets.

But other scientists have cited problems with the theory, including a lack
of clear evidence for any meteor, and the knotty question of how
micro-aliens might have stayed aloft for months after bursting out of a
meteor.

"Without conclusive evidence such as meteoritic dust mixed with red rain, it
is difficult to say anything specific about Kerala's red rain," McCafferty
wrote. But in history, he added, "there appears to be a strong link between
some reported events [like it] and meteoritic activity. The reported
airburst just before the fall of red rain in Kerala fits a familiar pattern,
and cannot be dismissed so easily as an unrelated coincidence."


Source: World Science
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/080122_red-rain.htm

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


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