Red Rain – Alien Life?
I’ve mentioned this previously, but I figure it is time for an update:
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 In previous, unpublished papers, the pair also claimed the particles could reproduce in extreme heat.
And now a new study links the new case with ancient red rain stories:
“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.”
In reading the “Wired” entry I followed the “Red Rain” link …. did you know that the district of Kerala has the highest literacy rate in the world? Something like 94.5%! And, strangely, Kodinhi which is a town in the district has more twins than anywhere else in the world – 220 sets in a town of 2,000 people (see link: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/twin-town-5040/Overview).
The second angel sounded his trumpet, and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned into blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed. (Revelation 8:8-9 NIV)