The Strange Case India’s Alien Rainfall

Source: DATELINE ZERO

In 2001, a bizarre red rain showered India’s southern state of Kerala. This freaked a lot of people out because there were many people who believed that the new century was bringing troubles … perhaps of an apocalyptic nature.

Some people panicked, other pointed to a recently erupted volcano as a more down-to-earth explanation (dust), others shrugged.

But then it happened again. And again. For a good few months this happened on and off. Many people living in the area were freaked out, or incredibly curious.

Naturally, most people figured that scientists would look into this and find a quote –reasonable explanation — unquote, and then the whole thing would be forgotten by the end of the decade.

This hasn’t happened. Here we are at the end of the decade, and the research continues to evoke a “WTF!?” response from people wanting to know what this red rain is all about. Others insist that what was found within the red rain cannot be true.

From Fast Company:

For two months in 2001, on and off, red-colored rain fell over Kerala, southern India. One of the many people who observed the phenomenon was physicist Godfrey Louis–he collected a sample to work out where the color came from, suspecting desert dust, which is often responsible for vaguely biblical-seeming events like this.

Except Godfrey discovered something weird was responsible for the color: Biological cells, red in color, that bore no relation to blood cells and contained no DNA. Writing up the discovery in the journal Astrophysics and Space in 2006, Godfrey included the controversial, but scientifically plausible, suggestion that a comet had brought the cells to our solar system from the depths of space, and fragments had descended into Earth’s atmosphere as meteorites.

The cells could have survived and seeded the clouds that formed the weird red rain.

To say this is a contentious theory is an understatement: Godfrey was asserting that extraterrestrial living entities had arrived on Earth from space. In a serious science publication. With proper, laboratory-based experiments.

This may or may not freak you out, depending on your level of skepticism, scientific education, or religiousness, and your confidence in the veracity (or lack thereof) of the initial claims. If so, then don’t read the next bit:

In the intervening years Louis, in collaboration with scientists from around the world, has kept investigating the cells, and he’s just published a new paper about them. He’s discovered that while the cells are “inert” at room temperature, if you heat them to 121 Celsius, “daughter cells appear within the original mother cells and the number of cells in the samples increases with the length of exposure to 121 degrees C.”

Boil this scientific discovery down to its component parts and you get the following:

1 – Red cells fell in rain for a short period.
2 – The cells appear unlike almost anything found on Earth.
3 – The cells can reproduce, under conditions that are slightly unusual for biological material.
4 – Clearly they’re meant as alien pods that, thanks to global warming, will soon activate and enslave the sweaty, heatstroked human race who can’t evolve fast enough to keep up.

Okay, we made up No. 4.

More on the new paper from Discover Magazine, in an article titled: “India’s Red Rain: Still Cloudy With a Chance of Alien?”

The new paper (pdf) appears in Arxiv.org, not a peer-reviewed journal. But it repeats earlier work by Louis and a collaborator that they say shows the cell-like particles can survive and grow at high temperatures that would kill most life as we know it (around 250 degrees Fahrenheit). At room temperature, particles appear as inert as, well, odd looking red rain dirt.

Louis and his colleagues hypothesize that extraterrestrial cell-like particles could have traveled on a meteor that burst in Earth’s atmosphere and seeded the rain cloud responsible for Kerala’s unusual weather. That would provide support for the “panspermia” theory–the idea that life on Earth came from outer space.

The Wikipedia article includes other proposed explanations. The most plausible was that the red rain is from algae spores. The small spores were carried into the air and fell in heavy concentrations with the rains. The algae has a strong orange color, and can sometimes appear yellow or (most often) red.

A few sources are sited for this, one of which is a 2001 report titled “Colored Rain: A Report on the Phenomenon,” available as a pdf download. The other is a 2001 article titled “Red rain was fungus, not meteor,” from The Indian Express.

The color was found to be due to the presence of a large amount of spores of a lichen-forming alga belonging to the genus Trentepohlia. Field verification showed that the region had plenty of such lichens. Samples of lichen taken from Changanacherry, when cultured in an algal medium, also showed the presence of the same species of algae. Both samples (from rainwater and from trees) produced the same kind of algae, indicating that the spores seen in the rainwater most probably came from local sources.

But there’s more. There could well have been spores from native sources in the rain water. However, the observation that the cells contained no DNA was made after the algae suggestion, so many people went back to the drawing board.

As explained in the Wikipedia article:

In 2003 Godfrey Louis and Santhosh Kumar, physicists at the Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, Kerala … proposed that a meteor (from a comet containing the red particles) caused the sound and flash and when it disintegrated over Kerala it released the red particles which slowly fell to the ground. However, they omitted an explanation on how debris from a meteor continued to fall in the same area over a period of two months while unaffected from winds.
…
The absence of DNA is key to Louis and Kumar’s hypothesis that the cells were of extraterrestrial origins.

Spores from a local source offers a better explanation of the continued fall of red rain. It also easily explains how this has happened repeatedly in India. The algae explanation makes a lot of damn sense.

And it’s not as if this is unheard of. There have been strange occurrences all over the world of small fish, tadpoles, and even frogs falling from the sky. In fact there was an incident of small fish falling during a rainstorm in India in 2008.

However [pause for dramatic effect] the spores explanation fails to explain the lack of any DNA within the cells. So WTF!? And the very recent discovery that the cells actually reproduce under those unusual circumstances adds a 2nd WTF!?

Perhaps these are repeated attempts by extraterrestrials to do something insidious? Who knows?

Interestingly, another scientist had also taken a look at the cells, to see for himself whether or not there is DNA. Afterward, he preferred not to comment.

From The Guardian, with emphasis added:

In last week’s article on red rain (World, early editions), Dr Milton Wainwright was quoted as saying that red rain lacked DNA. Dr Wainwright has asked us to make clear that currently he has no view on whether red rain contains DNA and that it is physicist Godfrey Louis who is of that view.

In other words, he is washing his hands of this. Someone else can go on record, and he would rather have nothing to do with this.

Perhaps he was a little freaked out by what he saw? Before that decision to not say either way what he saw, Dr Milton Wainwright stated, “Life as we know it must contain DNA, or it’s not life.”

Perhaps it would be better to say: “Life as we know it must contain DNA, or it’s not life … as we know it.”

Read the full post at DATELINE ZERO