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.

Full article here:

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