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.”