Close Encounter of the Seventh Kind?

Lord, what a great time to be studying science. Here's a mystery that includes biology, astronomy, genetics, language, all kinds of high level abstractions having to do with, well, aliens.

Red rain could prove that aliens have landed

by Amelia Gentleman and Robin McKie
Sunday March 5, 2006
The Observer

There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University's microbiology laboratory. The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting. Yet, if one group of scientists is correct, the phial contains the first samples of extraterrestrial life isolated by researchers.

Inside the bottle are samples left over from one of the strangest incidents in recent meteorological history. On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the next two months. All along the coast it rained crimson, turning local people's clothes pink, burning leaves on trees and falling as scarlet sheets at some points.

Investigations suggested the rain was red because winds had swept up dust from Arabia and dumped it on Kerala. But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense. 'If you look at these particles under a microscope, you can see they are not dust, they have a clear biological appearance.' Instead Louis decided that the rain was made up of bacteria-like material that had been swept to Earth from a passing comet. In short, it rained aliens over India during the summer of 2001.

IMO, they have to be aliens. They were smart enough not to bother communicating with George Bush while he was in India - the "take me to your leader" cliche. But then again, most humans don't waste their time with that either. In any case, this should provoke some very interesting classroom discussions.

Here's what the levels of encounters can be.