After nine years of research, panspermia theorists have said that the ‘red’ rains that occurred in India in July 2001 contained bugs that were unlike anything ever found on the Earth, suggesting that it may be an alien form of life.
Panspermia is the idea that all life on Earth was seeded from comets, asteroids or meteors that struck the planet and contained the building blocks necessary to kick-start the evolutionary process.
Godfrey Louis, a physicist, and Chandra Wickramasinghe, a panspermia theorist from the UK, said that the bugs that turned the rain red in India may have come from a comet that exploded above the Earth and seeded clouds.
Louis said that the cells - inert at room temperature - begin to reproduce at 121C and within two hours of being exposed to the heat, "daughter cells appear within the original mother cells and the number of cells in the samples increases with length of exposure", reports News.com.au.
The team also found an unusual pattern in the way the cells changed colour under UV light, known as "fluorescence behaviour, suggesting, though not proving, an extraterrestrial origin.”
"As a biologist, let me assure you that a cell-sized and shaped organism that reproduces, lives off LB and doesn't appear to have any nucleic acid template (DNA or RNA) is a revolutionary discovery in and of itself," one commenter wrote at TechnologyReview.
As of now, the team's findings are yet to be verified.