Posts Tagged ‘Alien Life’

ALIEN life may already exist on Earth – us.

There’s an idea – common, but not popular in scientific circles – that all life on Earth was seeded from comets, asteroids or meteors which struck the planet and contained the building blocks necessary to kickstart the evolutionary process. It’s called “panspermia” and it caused an all-in boffin barney some 15 years ago when several scientists backed claims there was evidence of life in a Martian meteorite found in the Allan Hills in Antarctica. It’s been proven that life can survive in space, just as it’s been proven that the interior of the Mars meteorite never rose above 50C during its journey to Earth. Unfortunately for alien-spotters, those cells can also be found on Earth, so the argument’s never been settled.

Then in July 2001, the rain turned red in India. And not just red – The Hindu claimed witness reports of yellow, green and black rain in the months that followed. The first theory to emerge was that it was simply sand or dust picked up from a desert, but a local physicist, Godfrey Louis, found that under a microscope, the water contained cells that looked like bugs.Five years later, he published a theory suggesting the bugs that turned the rain red in India may have come from a comet that exploded above the Earth and seeded clouds.

Today, after a further four years of studying the cells, joined by a leading panspermia theorist from the UK, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Professor Louis has published claims that they are unlike anything found on Earth. He says the cells – inert at room temperature – begin to reproduce at 121C.Within two hours of being exposed to the heat, “daughter cells appear within the original mother cells and the number of cells in the samples increases with length of exposure”, they say in the new report. While many spores on Earth can survive that kind of extreme heat, none have yet been discovered that can reproduce in those conditions, much less require it to begin reproducing.

The team also found an unusual pattern in the way the cells changed colour under UV light, known as “fluorescence behaviour”.They said it was “in remarkable correspondence” with red emissions from the Red Rectangle planetary nebula some 2300 light years away, “suggesting, though not proving, an extraterrestrial origin”.While the panspermia angle is already being rejected by the scientific community at large, there’s plenty of interest in the final finding of Prof Louis’s team – the cells contain no DNA. ”As a biologist, let me assure you that a cell-sized and shaped organism that reproduces, lives off LB and doesn’t appear to have any nucleic acid template (DNA or RNA) is a revolutionary discovery in and of itself,” one commenter wrote at TechnologyReview.

The only lifeforms that occur on Earth without DNA, according to another commenter, are proteins known as “prions”, best known on Earth as the cause of Mad Cow Disease. The team’s findings are yet to be verified.

THANKS TO NEWS.COM.AU AND   KEN PFEIFER MUFON NEW JERSEY

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For almost half a decade, the SETI project has unsuccessfully searched for alien life. However, SETI may be looking for the wrong kind of signals from extraterrestrials, believe two researchers.

University of California, Irvine astrophysicist Gregory Benford and his twin, James – a fellow physicist specializing in high-powered microwave technology – believe there is a better approach to locating aliens.

In two studies appearing in the June issue of the journal Astrobiology, the Benford brothers, along with James’s son Dominic, a NASA scientist, examine the perspective of a civilization sending signals into space – or, as Gregory Benford puts it, “the point of view of the guys paying the bill.”

The physics professor says: “Our grandfather used to say, ‘Talk is cheap, but whiskey costs money’. Whatever the life form, evolution selects for economy of resources. Broadcasting is expensive, and transmitting signals across light-years would require considerable resources.”

Assuming that an alien civilization would strive to optimise costs, limit waste and make its signalling technology more efficient, the Benfords propose that these signals would not be continuously blasted out in all directions but rather would be pulsed, narrowly directed and broadband in the 1-to-10-gigahertz range.

“This approach is more like Twitter and less like War and Peace,” says James Benford, founder and president of Microwave Sciences Inc. in Lafayette, Calif.

Their concept of short, targeted blips – dubbed “Benford beacons” by the science press – has gotten extensive coverage in such publications as Astronomy Now. Well-known cosmologist Paul Davies, in his 2010 book The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, supports the theory.

This means that SETI, which focuses its receivers on narrow-band input, may be looking for the wrong kind of signals. The Benfords and a growing number of scientists involved in the hunt for extraterrestrial life advocate adjusting SETI receivers to maximize their ability to detect direct, broadband beacon blasts.

But the question remains: where do we look? The Benfords’ frugal-alien model points to our own Milky Way galaxy, especially the centre, where 90 percent of its stars are clustered.

Gregory Benford says: “The stars there are a billion years older than our sun, which suggests a greater possibility of contact with an advanced civilization than does pointing SETI receivers outward to the newer and less crowded edge of our galaxy.

“Will searching for distant messages work? Is there intelligent life out there? The SETI effort is worth continuing, but our common-sense beacons approach seems more likely to answer those questions.” 

Thanks to  http://www.ufocasebook.com  and http://sify.com

KEN PFEIFER MUFON NEW JERSEY

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Gary McKinnon admits hacking into US military computers in 2001 and 2002 but maintains he was looking for evidence of alien life. President Barack Obama has given fresh hope to the autistic man who is battling extradition to America on computer hacking charges. Mr Obama pledged to find an ‘appropriate solution’ after David Cameron raised the issue of Asperger’s sufferer Gary McKinnon during his first visit to the White House as Prime Minister. Mr McKinnon – supported by his mother Janis Sharp, has fought an eight year legal battle to prevent his extradition to the US – where he faces up to 60 years in jail if convicted of computer hacking.

Thanks to the Daily Galaxy

KEN PFEIFER MUFON NEW JERSEY

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Mario Borghezio, an Italian member of the European Parliament, says the European Union needs to focus on UFOs and he wants the EU to set up an “observatory” to catalogue incidents of people seeing UFOs in the sky. Serious, thorough research would expose a “systematic cover-up” of UFOs, he said. In his latest press release, Mr. Borghezio quotes an Italian astrophysicist named Massimo Teodorani: “The phenomenon of UFOs is a real manifestation which can be estimated through the physics and the astronomy.”

Italian European Member of the Parliament Mario Borghezio, sponsored the draft resolution that, if passed, would require EU governments to declassify their secret files on UFOs.
The declaration also calls for a research center to investigate alien life. So far, Thirty-One European Members of the 736-seat Parliament Support of Borghezio’s UFO initiative.

 Borghezio said, “Many members of the scientific community have been looking into the issue of UFOs and have denounced the systematic covering up of information on the subject.” He pointed out that the 33rd General Assembly of the United Nations had officially recognized the existence of UFOs in 1978. We encourage you to write the European Members of Parliament.

Thanks to the Filer Files and the Daily Mail.co.uk 

KEN PFEIFER MUFON NEW JERSEY

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