Modern Cosmology

A sampling device launched into the Earth’s stratosphere by U.K. researchers in July has come back with what they say is evidence of alien life transported on comets.

A report published in the Journal of Cosmology by the University of Sheffield researchers states the device brought back biological entities “too large to have been carried from Earth.”

“As a result, we conclude that the biological entities arrived from space, probably from comets.”

Articles about alien life published in the journal have come into question by at least one scientist.

Author, astronomist, and skeptic Phil Plait criticized a previous article in the journal about life found on a meteorite. “If there’s a story practically guaranteed to go viral, it’s about evidence of life in space. And if you have pictures, why, that’s going to spread like, well, like a virus,” he wrote in Slate.

He described that article: “Really, really wrong. Way, way, way ridiculously oh-holy-wow-how-could-anyone-publish-this wrong.”

The Journal of Cosmology’s editor-in-chief is Rudolf Schild, Ph.D., of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard-Smithsonian. The journal’s website states that every article is peer reviewed by “at least two recognized experts who specialize in the topic under consideration.”

The recent study, led by Dr. Milton Wainwright, states that the most convincing evidence of alien life found in the sampling device is filaments that are high in carbon and oxygen.

The microfilaments’ structure is similar to spore-bearing structures seen in fungi.

The device also brought back three biological entities unlike anything seen before. One is described as a “flat sculptured surface which appears like a cell.” Another is a “shield-like structure.” And another is “a long tube-like structure possessing a fibre-like interior.”

Closely intermingled with these three entities is a fourth, which is “highly reminiscent of a red rain cell.”

Red rain cells have also been the subject of a controversial study claiming evidence of alien life.

Parts of Kerala State, India, experienced red-colored rain in 2001.

In 2001, it was attributed to “colored lichen-forming algal spores of local origin” by India’s Centre for Earth Science Studies.

In 2003, it was attributed by scientists at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre to a colored dust cloud that had traveled to India from the Persian Gulf, according to a Times of India article from that time.

In 2006, Santhosh Kumar and Godfrey Louis, both physicists at the Mahatma Gandhi University in Kerala, suggested a link between the red-colored particles and a meteor airburst event.

They found biological cells in the rain; the cells, they said, strangely had no DNA. They argued for the possibility of extraterrestrial origin from cometary fragments.

via Alien Life Arrives on Comets?—A Controversial Study: photo 2.