NASA Scientist Claims to See Alien Life In Meteorites, Controversy Ensues
The jury is still out, but skepticism permeates the scientific community Did a NASA scientist find fossilized alien microbes embedded in a 146-year-old meteorite? As this claim emerged over the weekend, the answer from the scientific community so far appears to be something between "Um, what?" and "No." Saturday afternoon, the Journal of Cosmology, which has made a name for itself by publishing provocative papers about controversial topics, sent out a mass press release announcing a new paper by the award-winning astrobiologist Richard Hoover, who studies extremophiles at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He described filaments and other structures inside a rare type of meteorite that look like some unknown form of cyanobacteria. As several others have pointed out, this is not the first time Hoover has made this claim, and similar arguments have been made before, including this paper by NASA astrobiologist David McKay (which Nature's Great Beyond blog notes is not...