> British Scientists Collect Evidence of Alien Life from Stratosphere Wow, great! Let's read some more ... > Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe ... Oh, S * * t

> British Scientists Collect Evidence of Alien Life from Stratosphere Wow, great! Let's read some more ... > Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe ... Oh, S * * t. I remember that name. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Wickramasinghe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Wickramasinghe Quote: "More recently, Wickramasinghe has hypothesized that elementary living organisms like the lichen-forming alga spores present in the red rain in Kerala are of extraterrestrial origin, and that pathogens as the SARS virus also arrived on Earth from deep space carried in asteroids and comets. However, these speculations lack support from the scientific community ..." The article's title is extremely misleading. In point of fact, British scientists did not "collect evidence of alien life from the stratosphere". They collected a biological sample that could have had a terrestrial origin. And if the sample cells have DNA, that probability becomes a near-certainty. Reading on: "However, certain people claim that bacteria-like life forms could have passed into the higher atmosphere from Earth and not from space." Those "certain people" are called "scientific skeptics", a class on which science depends -- people who assume the null hypothesis, the precept that a claim is false until reliable evidence forces us to a different conclusion. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" -- Carl Sagan