In August of 2000, a shower of dead fish fell onto Great Yarmouth after a thunderstorm. Live toads dropped on a Mexican town back in 1997. And quite frequently, dust in the air produces colored rain, like the red-tinted rain that dropped fine grit from the Sahara over southern
In 2001, then, when red rain—as red as blood, in some cases–fell over the southwestern Indian state of Kerala sporadically from July 25 to September 23, the first assumption was that the rainwater had been contaminated by dust.
A report commissioned by the Government of India’s Department of Science and Technology, concluded in November of 2001, however, ruled out dust, and instead put the color down to the presence of spores from a lichen-forming algae common to the region.
That might have been the end of the matter if not for Godfrey Louis, a solid-state physicist at
An optical microscope revealed red particles four to 10 micrometres wide (a bit larger than a typical bacteria) with an average density of 9 million particles per milliliter. Based on that density, Louis and Kuma calculated that in total at least 50 tonnes of the red particles dropped from the sky.
An electron microscope showed that the particles clearly looked like biological cells. They have thick walls and are cup-shaped—which makes them look a lot like red blood cells. Which is exactly what Charles Cockell at the Open University in the
It’s true that many people reported hearing a loud, house-rattling sonic boom in the Kottayam district early on July 25, 2001, just hours before the first red rain. After interviewing ear-witnesses, Louis concluded it was too loud to be a thunderclap, and may indeed have been a meteor exploding in the atmosphere.
But while Louis accepts the meteor, he doesn’t believe in splattered bat blood as an explanation. He thinks the meteor arrived carrying the red particles, and scattered them through the clouds when it exploded. He believes the red particles are, in fact, extraterrestrial life.
Chemical analysis revealed they’re 50 percent carbon and 45 percent oxygen with traces of sodium and iron, consistent with biological material. But Louis’s tests didn’t turn up any sign of the DNA you’d expect to find in any living thing that originated on this planet.
In January Louis’s and Kuma’s paper, “The Red Rain Phenomenon of Kerala and Its Possible Extraterrestrial Origin,” was published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Astrophysics and Space Science.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is a famous saying in science. Louis sent samples to two other labs for analysis:
Louis probably chose Wickramasinghe because he is a leading proponent of panspermia, the theory that life might have originated elsewhere and been carried to Earth by comets.
The
With or without DNA, the cells may have other bizarre traits. Although he left it out of his January paper, Louis has said previously that he has seen the cells reproducing in water superheated to more than 300 degrees C. Nothing on Earth that we know of can live in water above about 120 degrees.
Cells able to live in such extreme conditions just might be cells adapted to life in the unbelievably harsh environment of a comet or meteor hurtling through outer space.
Terrestrial or extraterrestrial, something weird fell in the red rain of Kerala.
With any luck, we’ll know more in a few weeks.
