NASA scientist finds evidence of alien life

[RedCloud]

Source: Yahoo News

Bacteria in Meteorites Aliens Journal of Cosmology

Aliens exist, and we have proof.

That astonishingly awesome claim comes from Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, who says he has found conclusive evidence of alien life — fossils of bacteria found in an extremely rare class of meteorite called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites. (There are only nine such meteorites on planet Earth.) Hoover’s findings were published late Friday night in the Journal of Cosmology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” Hoover, who has spent more than 10 years studying meteorites around the world, told FoxNews.com in an interview. “This field of study has just barely been touched — because quite frankly, a great many scientist would say that this is impossible.”

Hoover discovered the fossils by breaking apart the CI1 meteorite, and analyzing the exposed rock with a scanning-electron microscope and a field emission electron-scanning microscope, which allowed him to detect any fossil remains. What he found were fossils of micro-organisms (pictured below), many of which he says are strikingly similar to those found on our own planet (pictured above).

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/nasascientistfindsevidenceofalienlife

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And so it begins.

[Ian David]

1. It's starting to look like this MIGHT be a hoax. Stay tuned. n/t

[RedCloud]

2. Where have I seen that shape before?

[Ian David]

3. Hoax

Did scientists discover bacteria in meteorites?

<snip>

Fox News broke the story, which ought to make one immediately suspicious — it's not an organization noted for scientific acumen. But even worse, the paper claiming the discovery of bacteria fossils in carbonaceous chondrites was published in … the Journal of Cosmology. I've mentioned Cosmology before — it isn't a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth. It doesn't exist in print, consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s, and publishes lots of empty noise with no substantial editorial restraint. For a while, it seemed to be entirely the domain of a crackpot named Rhawn Joseph who called himself the emeritus professor of something mysteriously called the Brain Research Laboratory, based in the general neighborhood of Northern California (seriously, that was the address: "Northern California"), and self-published all of his pseudo-scientific "publications" on this web site.

It is not an auspicious beginning. Finding credible evidence of extraterrestrial microbes is the kind of thing you'd expect to see published in Science or Nature, but the fact that it found a home on a fringe website that pretends to be a legitimate science journal ought to set off alarms right there.

But could it be that by some clumsy accident of the author, a fabulously insightful, meticulously researched paper could have fallen into the hands of single-minded lunatics who rushed it into 'print'? Sure. And David Icke might someday publish the working plans for a perpetual motion machine in his lizardoid-infested newsletter. We've actually got to look at the claims and not dismiss them because of their location.

<snip>

Reading the text, my impression is one of excessive padding. It's a dump of miscellaneous facts about carbonaceous chondrites, not well-honed arguments edited to promote concision or cogency. The figures are annoying; when you skim through them, several will jump out at you as very provocative and looking an awful lot like real bacteria, but then without exception they all turn out to be photos of terrestrial organisms thrown in for reference. The extraterrestrial 'bacteria' all look like random mineral squiggles and bumps on a field full of random squiggles and bumps, and apparently, the authors thought some particular squiggle looked sort of like some photo of a bug. This isn't science, it's pareidolia. They might as well be analyzing Martian satellite photos for pictures that sorta kinda look like artifacts.

More:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/did_scientists_discover_bacter.php

[RedCloud]

4. Last statement first...

I once taught NASA folks. Some claimed they need to find funding. I suspect letting the public go rampant is one way.

As far as a life form goes, the less recognizable it is the better. It is incredible that a life form would follow the paths taken by ours with so many other variants available.

[Deep13]

5. Anytime someone finds a life form in a meteor that fell to Earth...

...the first question one should ask is, "How do we know that it isn't a terrestrial life form that contaminated the meteorite after it got to Earth?"

[Javaman]

6. Personally, I welcome our new fossilized bacteria overlords. nt

[hobbit709]

7. NASA sent a probe into the Fox Newsroom?

[sofa king]

8. Here's the paper.

http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html

The "oh, sh!t" moment for me while reading that paper came from figures 1d and 1e.





The top one is a structure from the interior of a carbonaceous meteorite, while the bottom is a regular old cyanobacteria. Note the internal structures in both. This particular meteorite was observed to fall in Tanzania in 1938 and was quickly recovered, so there is no chance that the cyanobacteria infiltrated and were fossilized after the fall.

It does occur to me, however, that the meteorite could be a hunk of the earth itself that was blown into orbit from an asteroid strike and later fell because it returned to its orbital point of origin and was recaptured. The author of the paper doesn't seem to think so, though.