Finding (funding) fossil aliens. Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre claims to have found fossils of bacteria in rare types of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites. According to articles in the Journal of Cosmology March 2011 and Courier Mail 6 March 2011. Hoover cracked open the meteorites under sterile conditions, examined them with an electron microscope, and found cylindrical and filamentous structures which he claims are fossilised bacteria similar to bacteria existing on earth, but must have come from outer space. Hoover commented: “What is both exciting and extraordinary is although many of the bacteria resemble and can be associated with generic species on Earth, there are others which are completely alien. Neither I nor other experts who have seen the evidence have any idea what these creatures might be. I believe these findings indicate that life is not restricted to Earth, but is broadly distributed, even outside our solar system.”
Carl Gibson of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at Scripps Institute and the University of California at San Diego commented: “Dr. Hoover has provided the world with extraordinary evidence to back up extraordinary claims. This discovery completely changes our perspective of the nature of life and our place in the Universe; the world will never be the same.”
Not all NASA scientists are convinced. David Marais, an astrobiologist with NASA’s AMES Research Centre, noted that similar claims had been made before and found to be false. He commented: “It’s an extraordinary claim, and thus I’ll need extraordinary evidence.”
Editorial Comment: As the reputable Nature journal reports, online 8 March 2011 – “The aliens haven’t landed – the discovery of alien life might reasonably be expected to create headline news. But the media response to just such an announcement in the Journal of Cosmology has been muted, and mostly dismissive.”
Back at Creation Research we note this story was published a few days after news stories about NASA facing funding cuts, making it so similar to the connection between funding needs and the publishing dates (1996) of the Mars Rock claims about ‘fossil alien life’ from a meteorite found in Antarctica in 1984. (The 1996 Mars rocks ‘fossils’ were found to be just natural rock formations. But Hoover’s claims about fossil bacteria in carbonaceous meteorites were originally presented at a NASA colloquium in 2007.
The most important point about this claim is that like the many recent stories about “earth-like” planets being discovered, this latest Alien Story is part of an ongoing effort to convince people that life, including human life, is just the result of natural processes and can occur anywhere in the universe, wherever the right chemicals are found. The out of this world scenario comes from the fact that since no-one has been able to show how life could evolve from chemicals on earth, one claimed solution is that life evolved somewhere else in the universe and came to earth via meteorites. But that does not tell us how life originated – it simply shifts the question to somewhere else, while the alien proponents hope you don’t notice the question is still unanswered. Yes it is possible for God to have created life anywhere in the Universe He wanted,but the only place we are told He did make life is on this planet earth. (See Genesis 1: 14-19). (Ref. astrobiology, space, fossilisation)
Evidence News 9 Mar 2011