Red rain is coming down…
Red rain is pouring down
Pouring down all over me…
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p>In 2001, Kerala residents heard a sonic boom in the sky followed by two months of mysterious red rain. A physicist in Kerala took samples of the downpour and found what looked like cells without DNA. He believes that the material came from a meteor which exploded while aloft and speculates that the specimens were aliens hitching a panspermic ride. He’s pretty sure they aren’t red earth in pouring rain (thanks, masale.wallah):
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…
Dr. Godfrey Louis has just released these magnified images of the cells in a new paper in Astrophysics and Space Science (via Digg).
Many scientists are skeptical and finger an Earth source for the cells:
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. [Link]
The biological study… revealed a red coloured cell structure. This has been tentatively identified as spores of some fungus species and are now being cultured by the TBGRI. ”The red colour of the rain appears to be mainly because of the spores…”[Link]The researchers didn’t dispute the panspermia theory itself, which has a substantial scientific following. “Panspermia may well be possible,” wrote Lynn J. Rothschild of the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., in an email. “I’m just not so sure that this is a case of it.” [Link]
Louis and his supporters fired back:
These findings… raise doubts on whether the explosive sound reported by residents and the red rain were independent events. There are other posers too which remain unanswered: What produced the huge quantity of spores? Is the source local or distant? How were the spores injected into the clouds? If the source is not local, how was the mass transported without getting distributed over a large area? [Link]
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. [Link]
The scientists have also rejected reports that the rain was accompanied by thunder and lightning. “Lightning does not occur during the southwest monsoons. Lightning is produced from large cumulonimbus clouds which develop only when plenty of humid air is available on the earth’s surface. The conditions at the time were not suitable for this. Secondly, people over a radius of around only 1.5 km heard the sound. This is highly improbable… therefore, the only possibility is that the sound was actually a sonic boom produced by some object moving at supersonic speed at a relatively low altitude. Since no aircraft is expected to fly at supersonic speeds close to the ground, it is opined that a meteor had approached the area and possibly exploded to produce red colour rain.” [Link]
The “striking red colouration” turned out to come from microscopic, mixed-in red particles, they added, which had “no similarity with usual desert dust.” At least 50,000 kg (55 tons) of the particles have fallen in all, they estimated. “An analysis of this strange phenomenon further shows that the conventional atmospheric transport processes like dust storms etc. cannot explain” it.
“The red particles were uniformly dispersed in the rainwater,” they wrote. “When the red rainwater was collected and kept for several hours in a vessel, the suspended particles have a tendency to settle to the bottom.” “The red rain occurred in many places during a continuing normal rain,” the paper continued. “It was reported from a few places that people on the streets found their cloths stained by red raindrops. In a few places the concentration of particles were so great that the rainwater appeared almost like blood.”
The precipitation, the researchers added, had a “highly localized appearance. It usually occur[ed] over an area of less than a square kilometer to a few square kilometers. Many times it had a sharp boundary, which means while it was raining strongly red at a place a few meters away there were no red rain…”The rainwater appeared almost like blood
“Vessels kept in open space also collected red rain. Thus it is not something that is washed out from rooftops or tree leaves. Considering the huge quantity of red particles fallen over a wide geographic area, it is impossible to imagine that these are some pollen or fungal spores which have originated from trees,” they added. “The nature of the red particles rules out the possibility that these are dust particles from a distant desert source,” they wrote, and such particles “are not found in Kerala or nearby place.”
One easy assumption is that they “got airlifted from a distant source on Earth by some wind system,” they added, but this leaves several puzzles. “One characteristic of each red rain case is its highly localized appearance. If particles originate from distant desert source then why [was] there were no mixing and thinning out of the particle collection during transport”? they wrote. [Link]
Even better, they’re aliiive.
Louis and Kumar have previously posted other, unpublished papers saying the particles can grow if placed in extreme heat, and reproduce… [Link]
I’m neither an astrophysicist nor a geobiologist, though we keep one on hand for SM keggers. An Earth source for these cells seems most likely. But I’m getting a kick out of seeing Kottayam, Ernakulam and Kollam mentioned in a journal of astrophysics. It’s all very mysteeerious and otherworldy, and only several hundred miles north of the abode of Arthur C. Clarke.
Is it serendipity or did we just get plain lucky to have an Astrobiologist at hand, in case of an attack!
I’m confused about the author’s name. Look at his website at http://education.vsnl.com/godfrey/ and tell me if his name is “Dr Godfrey Louis” or “Dr Louis Godfrey”.
Even though it’s his own personal website, he presents his name both ways, multiple times.
Maybe it’s because Malayalees are matrilineal?
WRONG! Nothing good could come out of Kottayam.. nothing.
Q: Can rudimentary life survive a journey with direct exposure to the space environement? A: Yes.
Also see here.
Q: Is this Panspermia thing for real? A: Yes. Impact experiments have shown that in theory organisms can survive inside chunks of rock blown off of one planetary body and find is way to another planet based on impact trajectory and gravitational attraction. Many people believe that all the planetary protection restrictions (i.e. to prevent the “Andromeda strain“) we place on bringing things back from another planet are a waste of money. We have already been exposed to tons of Martian material. In fact, in theory life on Earth could have originated on Mars and then seeded the Earth.
Q: Were the sonic boom and the red rain related? A: Inconclusive. People may have just heard a plane overhead at the same time and want to believe that the events are related. If it wasn’t a plane then it could have been something on the ground or simply imagined.
Q: Is it most likely that these originated from an Earth Source? A: Yes. Windblown particles can remain suspended in the upper atmosphere for quite some time. If these are found to be spores then this explanation is very likely.
I’ll believe this only if I see a peer-reviewed paper where they prove this. From what I have read there is no DNA/RNA and no obvious nucleus. If that is true it would lead one to guess that maybe this was an inogranic substance of some kind. Also interesting is the fact that “red rains” have been reported before.
Of everything I have read, the following seems to be the best off-the-cuff explanation until more scientists examine this stuff:
Despite everything above, I sure hope they turn out to be evidence of extra-terrestrial life 🙂
hmm red rain in kerala… extra-terrestrial life ?? Did Mista Shyamalan hear abt this..
Alien biological material? I cannot wait to see the “America saves the world” Hollywood movie inspired by this incident.
“Alien biological material? I cannot wait to see the “America saves the world” Hollywood movie inspired by this incident.”
I can’t wait to see the Bollywood knock off!
better be on the lookout for those spores turning into strange pods….
I can’t wait to see the Bollywood knock off!
count me in. and not that a smiled over the title post or anything….
“red rain in Kerala”. My initial intuition (without reading the story) was that the communists have won, again, in the upcoming state elections! 🙂
I’m confused about the author’s name.
From a friend:
Good luck: If it turns into Natasha Henstridge from Species.
Bad luck : If it turns into those bugs from Evolution (the David Duchovny comedy).
Really bad luck: If it’s the same red stuff that spread everywhere in Tom Cruise’s War of The Worlds.
“Life here began out there”, eh ? Aha, Lorne Greene was right all along…..So was that cool Hispanic dude who used to be the chief in “Miami Vice” 😉
gosh, when will the existence of jellybeans be recognized? chomp, chomp, gulp
About the naming.. your friend is not giving you the full truth.. The majority of Malayalees in North America are Syrian Christian and usually take the first name of their father as their last name & retain the house/family name, “tharawadh” name as well. For example: Thomas Francis of the Kurianparambil home – Francis would have been his father’s first name. If he had a son named John, typically in Kerala his son should be John Thomas of the Kurianparambil home. Because of the naming system here, it would probably be John Franics to keep father & son’s names the same. However I take issue with your friend, since we are talking about Syrian Christians, the names are biblical as their history has been in Kerala for millenia some have been “malayalamized” over time (ie: Chacko = Jacob). It’s not an issue about taking Western names, these are names that have been familial for generations, however as people have immigrated – the majority coming in the 70s – there is a smaller but growing trend to keep the home name as the last name to link children to the home plot in Kerala.
“Sometimes Malayalees use their first names as their last names (usually when their last names are really long) in an attempt to be more western. Unfortunately, this was a huge trend in the late 60’s and 70’s. Typically, the last name and the middle name are abbreviated in front of the first name i.e. K. A. Mathew.”
i’m surprised anna doesnt have anything to say on this.
there was this other theory that a flock(?) of bats were flying over kerala and a meteor hit them. apparently, bat blood was raining over god’s own country for 2 montha. i wonder how that would go though. would flocks of bats just keep flying over and meteors keep hitting them. or was it a particularly large flock of bats that had the misfortune to be hit a by one homicidal meteor.
ah, the mysteries of the universe boils down to good ol’ kerala and bat blood.
I would have thought of..
1) Rain with rusted iron particles 2) The red alluvial soil particles somehow mixing with the rain
However, if there are microbes involved.. it gets interesting! Though immediately jumping to a conclusion that it proves panspermia seems a bit far fetched. The odds would surely be a million to one for that to be the case.
Having said that, it would be so freaking cool to know that ‘they’ (as in da aliens) are already among us 😉