When an orange goo was first discovered off the Alaskan coast it had more than a few local residents scratching their heads in wonder. Shortly afterward samples were taken and analyzed. The first analysis showed they were organic in nature and not man-made. The second analysis gave indications that they may have been eggs. A third analysis now has turned the investigation on its head and tension is starting to build around the mysterious incident as arguments begin over what the substance was.
The lab in Charleston South Carolina says it has the answer, but the answer is nowhere near as conclusive as we residents would like. It is a fungus spore, but it may be a previously unidentified one. Questions over how such a quickly reproducing fungus could remain beyond the vision of scientists are not lost on the community, which will be investigating the matter further after the initial explanation – that the spores were merely eggs – fell through. But in the mean time, the NOAA has suggested filtering the specimens out of drinking water until the toxicity of the spores can be more conclusively analyzed.
But where did the egg explanation come from? And more importantly, where did the spores themselves come from? Are these merely another seasonal effect of the continuation of climate change? Or is there a stranger explanation waiting in a laboratory to be discovered? For now it appears the mysterious spores are simply of an unknown species of rust fungus, but until the species is positively identified there will be no shortage of speculation as to its origin. And even the stranger theories are not entirely without their foundation in a previous incident.
In July of 2001 a mysterious red rain fell in India that – when analyzed – turned out to be of extraterrestrial origin. Though the red rain was by no means an entirely isolated event, it was one of the first where the samples could then be taken to a lab and subsequently identified by scientists – as an entirely new species with strange DNA patterns that did not coincide with anything known to science at the time. And many of those scientists even theorized that it was an organic structure without any DNA to speak of, instead built and guided by some unknown force of nature. And the story got even stranger after that when word of its possible extraterrestrial origins got around. Of course this mysterious incident, which is continuing to deepen in strangeness even as the first official explanation is cast aside has some wondering if the possibilities are in a similar vein. Could we be seeing extraterrestrial visitors in the form of spores traveling from the frigid Arctic circle down to Alaska after possibly thousands of years in containment? Or is this possibly one of the unknown effects of the mass die offs reported in the ocean and elsewhere on Earth in recent months? Perhaps as further analysis continues we will know the answers to these and so many more questions.