In 2001 a rain fell on India that carried with it several things. Among them were superstition, panic, mystery, and according to some scientists alien life. And yet even today when we look back on the occurrence it seems fairly obvious that something beyond the normal was going on. The question is, what was it?
The red rain falling over Kerala contained several different types of fungus in it. Since fungus is so heavy, it would not have evaporated with the water vapor when the clouds were formed. So if fungus can’t float into the air with precipitation, how could it get from an unidentified location into the clouds and eventually fall to Earth?
Some people suggest wind could have picked up the fungus strain, but the sheer amount of material dropped on the Kerala region. When a representative area of the region was measured for red particle material, they found that with the consistency they were measuring an estimated that over 110,000 lbs of the red material had covered the area in a blanket of unknown life. That’s over 55 tons of material, or the weight of about 40 small cars. Suggesting the material was held aloft in the rain clouds has been compared to suggesting three semi trucks complete with trailers disappeared and floated into the air. Of course there is quite a bit of a difference, but it does illustrate that this amount of material in the sky would be very difficult to maintain altitude.
So what if the particles hadn’t gone up in the first place? What if they simply fell from space? The bacteria is, after all, having difficulty surviving in many Earthlike environments while it may have thrived elsewhere. The bacteria is, after all a very strange extremophile that would find most of Earth far too cold to survive on. The red cells reproduce under harsh circumstances such as at 572 degrees Fahrenheit. Additionally, tests by Santhosh Kumar suggest the cells have no recognizable DNA structure within them. Without these structures the organisms truly are impossible to classify as terrestrial.
And then there are the reports that the incidents were preceded by a loud crackle in the sky that could have been the sound of a meteor blowing up as it entered the atmosphere. If this were the case, then the alien bacteria hypothesis has yet another point of validation.
There have been other occurrences of bizarre things falling from the sky as well over Kerala. An incredibly rare and equally bizarre incident happened seven years later when fish were seen falling from the sky in the region. While this is still unusual, it’s certainly nowhere near as strange as a mystery bacteria falling in massive quantities that seems to be of alien origin.
But if they do turn out to be of otherworldly origin, then will we ever discover where they came from? Is life something that simply falls to our planet all the time? And if so, is it always so simple?