Are there traces of ancient bacteria trapped inside meteorites that fell to Earth decades ago? You can add that question to the list of unresolved issues surrounding the search for life beyond Earth, thanks to a just-published study by a NASA researcher.
The new study, published in the Journal of Cosmology, focuses on structures that look like the filaments that biologists typically see on micro-organisms known as cyanobacteria. Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, found the filamentary structures inside samples of meteorites that are thought to date back to the solar system's beginnings, more than 4 billion years ago.
If the structures are confirmed to be of biological but unearthly origin, that would serve as fresh evidence that life can make its way through outer space and "seed" planets, including our own, Hoover told me today.
Hoover's results will remain controversial until other researchers can duplicate his remarkable results. There is stubborn resistance by mainstream academia to anything that might indicate the presence of extraterrestrial life, for obvious reasons. If these carbonaceous meteorites are conclusively found to contain extraterrestrial bacterial fossils, then the UFO phenomenon would have to be regarded in a whole new light, which is something the powers that be would likely be very uncomfortable with. To read the rest of the article, click here.