Zoo Station

Firstly, thanks Sanjay for both pointing to this story and for letting me plunder your title as well. This is one of the wildest stories I have heard in recent times, and if true, it'll get even more amazing. Sanjay posted links to both the Guardian and Indian Express versions of this story and I'll excerpt from both, starting with the Guardian.

There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University's microbiology laboratory. The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting. Yet, if one group of scientists is correct, the phial contains the first samples of extraterrestrial life isolated by researchers.

Inside the bottle are samples left over from one of the strangest incidents in recent meteorological history. On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the next two months. All along the coast it rained crimson, turning local people's clothes pink, burning leaves on trees and falling as scarlet sheets at some points.

Investigations suggested the rain was red because winds had swept up dust from Arabia and dumped it on Kerala. But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense. 'If you look at these particles under a microscope, you can see they are not dust, they have a clear biological appearance.' Instead Louis decided that the rain was made up of bacteria-like material that had been swept to Earth from a passing comet. In short, it rained aliens over India during the summer of 2001.

Not everyone is convinced by the idea, of course. Indeed most researchers think it is highly dubious. One scientist who posted a message on Louis's website described it as 'bullshit'. But a few researchers believe Louis may be on to something and are following up his work. Milton Wainwright, a microbiologist at Sheffield, is now testing samples of Kerala's red rain. 'It is too early to say what's in the phial,' he said. 'But it is certainly not dust. Nor is there any DNA there, but then alien bacteria would not necessarily contain DNA.'

Critical to Louis's theory is the length of time the red rain fell on Kerala. Two months is too long for it to have been wind-borne dust, he says. In addition, one analysis showed the particles were 50 per cent carbon, 45 per cent oxygen with traces of sodium and iron: consistent with biological material. Louis also discovered that, hours before the first red rain fell, there was a loud sonic boom that shook houses in Kerala. Only an incoming meteorite could have triggered such a blast, he claims. This had broken from a passing comet and shot towards the coast, shedding microbes as it travelled. These then mixed with clouds and fell with the rain.

The Indian Express points to some parts of the scientific community that take this story seriously.

When he first came up with this theory in 2003, it was expected to die quickly but now an international journal, Astrophysics and Space Science, has accepted his paper. And New Scientist, in its latest issue, has a cover story ‘It’s raining aliens’ in which it has spoken to several scientists on Louis’s theory.
...
The international scientific community agrees that what fell was biological—the cell structure is unmistakable but there is no consensus on where it came from.
...
Louis suggests that the meteor was a fragment of a comet carrying microbes from space. The meteor burst shedding these alien microbes in the upper atmosphere. Some of the red microbes mixed with rain clouds and fell immediately, while the rest settled into clouds and fell in rain over the following weeks.

And here's the New Scientist cover story on the alien landing in Kerala, should you want to read it at source.

There's plenty of physics/astro types among ZS readers. What do you guys think? Plausible? April Fool's joke a month early? Of course, after addressing these mundane issues, we can move to the more sublime question, namely why did the aliens choose Kerala to land in? Reverse migration? Or maybe that god either doesn't exist or that she has an exquisite sense of humour? We'll get to that.

UPDATE: The New Scientist is behind a subscription wall, so if you want the full story, send me a note and I'll send it to you. You can also read Godfrey Louis's full paper here.