Posted on 03/05/2006 8:26:40 AM PST by Hadean
Amelia Gentleman and Robin McKie Sunday March 5, 2006 The Observer
There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University's microbiology laboratory. The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting. Yet, if one group of scientists is correct, the phial contains the first samples of extraterrestrial life isolated by researchers. Inside the bottle are samples left over from one of the strangest incidents in recent meteorological history. On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the next two months. All along the coast it rained crimson, turning local people's clothes pink, burning leaves on trees and falling as scarlet sheets at some points.
Investigations suggested the rain was red because winds had swept up dust from Arabia and dumped it on Kerala. But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense. 'If you look at these particles under a microscope, you can see they are not dust, they have a clear biological appearance.' Instead Louis decided that the rain was made up of bacteria-like material that had been swept to Earth from a passing comet. In short, it rained aliens over India during the summer of 2001.
(Excerpt) Read more at observer.guardian.co.uk ...
It's 72 white grapes, it never was 72 virgins:
http://www.chiesa.espressonline.it/dettaglio.jsp?id=7025&eng=y
I know a guy at work who takes the guardian seriously L0L
105 - beehive!
LOL
Hmmmm.......
And where and when did the bird flu first show up? < cue ominous music >
OUCH
You'd think if that were the case, the deserts along the Mexican border would be as lush as an Alpine meadow.
The "scientist" announcing this "discovery" was a physicist, NOT an expert in biology.
Haha! Hey wait, thats gross!
Aliens have been wreaking havoc for me my whole life. They're called viruses (virii?) and I hear most scientists view their dna as like nothing else on earth, therefore not originating from earth. Look at the electron microscope pictures of viruses and they certainly look alien.
They're not green and three feet tall, if they were maybe we could reason with them. They seem only intent on leaching off us. The smartest ones seem not to kill the host, such as Epstein Barre and Herpes.
Sound nutty? So did that "the Earth is not flat" thing.
*LOL*
Some of the fascinating portions of the article in New Scientist include the following excerpts:
"Cockell argues that there could be a simpler explanation the red particles are actually blood. "They look like red blood cells to me," he says. The size fits just right; red blood cells are normally about 6 to 8 micrometres wide. They are naturally dimpled just like the red rain particles. What's more, mammalian red blood cells contain no DNA because they don't have a cell nucleus."
"It's tough to explain, however, how 50 tonnes of mammal blood could have ended up in rain clouds. Cockell takes a wild guess that maybe a meteor explosion massacred a flock of bats, splattering their blood in all directions. India is home to around 100 species of bats, which sometimes fly to altitudes of 3 kilometres or more. "A giant flock of bats is actually a possibility maybe a meteor airburst occurred during a bat migration," he says. "But one would have to wonder where the bat wings are."
-snip-
"If they can't explain the origin of the samples, then the suggestion that they are alien life will gain credence. In that case, someone will have to verify an observation that Louis made which even he finds astonishing: that the cells replicate. In earlier unpublished papers, Louis says he cultured the red rain cells in unconventional nutrients, such as cedar wood oil, and showed that these DNA-devoid microbes divide happily at a temperature of 300 C. Louis admits he left these claims out of his latest paper because he thought they would be considered "too extraordinary".
Great song! Surprised it took 19 posts to reference it.
Interesting. I wonder if the organisms are alive.
That would be one tough bug. Hanging out in the Oort cloud is no picnic.
pity is I bet we never hear anything about this story ever again
Interesting pic from "Burning Man". Ever go to one?
I am trying to figure out how it does it. If you find out please tell.
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