[meteorite-list] Red Rain From Comets?

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon Mar 6 03:07:17 2006
Message-ID: <007a01c640f4$f6875520$86e08c46_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi,

    This particular red rain story has been around
for 5 years, since the rain fell in 2001. The "news"
here is that it's finally being tested by someone
other than the initial Indian investigators, whose
paper on the red rain particles was accepted by
"Astrophysics and Space Science," a well-known
journal (but pro-panspermia) this January.
    Louis and Kumar's paper can be found at:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0601/0601022.pdf

    Normally, I would blow this sort of thing off;
we all know the red rains are African (or Arabian)
dust. It fell on the Africa facing coast of India,
blah, blah... It's been widely bandied about on
nutty websites nobody wants to be seen looking
at, and so forth.

    But when I heard this evening, the BBC do a
story about Sheffield studying it, I dug up this
paper and read it. Now I'm sceptical about my
scepticism.
    Take a look at the microphotographs and the
TEM and SEM photos. This is not dust, obviously.
To call them "biological in appearance" is a study
in understatement and modesty.

    Not being an expert in anything biological nor
the appearance of cells in TEM and SEM, I invite
the List's sceptics, whom I know exist from the
last Panspermia go-round, to look this over and
post an opinion.

    They look like biological cells, but not like
the usual cells in some specific ways. They
have thick walls, membranes, surface features,
detail, and inner organizations, and are 4 to 8
micrometers in diameter.

    They have no DNA or RNA, apparently.

    Their bulk composition is mostly CHON
(carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen), 98%.

    They did fall from the sky, at least 50 tons
of them.

    They do not seem to do anything, do not
culture, grow, or change. However, sealed
jars of them in their original rainwater have
remained unchanged, undecayed or altered,
after four years. In they were inorganic, that
would be understandable, but a CHON
mixture would rot in rainwater, or be eaten
by real bacteria. The solution must have
some bacteria as they were primitively
collected; what happened to them?

    Comments? Ideas? Debunkment?


Sterling K. Webb
----------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ron Baalke" <baalke_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>
To: "Meteorite Mailing List" <meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 05, 2006 10:50 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Red Rain From Comets?


>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/space/article/0,,1723936,00.html
>
> Red rain could prove that aliens have landed
> Amelia Gentleman and Robin McKie
> The Observer (United Kingdom)
> March 5, 2006
>
> 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.
>
> Not everyone is convinced by the idea, of course. Indeed most
> researchers think it is highly dubious. One scientist who posted a
> message on Louis's website described it as 'bullshit'.
>
> But a few researchers believe Louis may be on to something and are
> following up his work. Milton Wainwright, a microbiologist at Sheffield,
> is now testing samples of Kerala's red rain. 'It is too early to say
> what's in the phial,' he said. 'But it is certainly not dust. Nor is
> there any DNA there, but then alien bacteria would not necessarily
> contain DNA.'
>
> Critical to Louis's theory is the length of time the red rain fell on
> Kerala. Two months is too long for it to have been wind-borne dust, he
> says. In addition, one analysis showed the particles were 50 per cent
> carbon, 45 per cent oxygen with traces of sodium and iron: consistent
> with biological material. Louis also discovered that, hours before the
> first red rain fell, there was a loud sonic boom that shook houses in
> Kerala. Only an incoming meteorite could have triggered such a blast, he
> claims. This had broken from a passing comet and shot towards the coast,
> shedding microbes as it travelled. These then mixed with clouds and fell
> with the rain. Many scientists accept that comets may be rich in organic
> chemicals and a few, such as the late Fred Hoyle, the UK theorist,
> argued that life on Earth evolved from microbes that had been brought
> here on comets. But most researchers say that Louis is making too great
> a leap in connecting his rain with microbes from a comet.
>
> For his part, Louis is unrepentant. 'If anybody hears a theory like
> this, that it is from a comet, they dismiss it as an unbelievable kind
> of conclusion. Unless people understand our arguments - people will just
> rule it out as an impossible thing, that extra-terrestrial biology is
> responsible for this red rain.'
>
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Received on Mon 06 Mar 2006 03:07:07 AM PST