NASA Infirms Alien Life Report

The news was made public by Richard Hoover, an engineer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama. However, it seems that NASA wants to distance itself from this news, saying that the rumors are not true. Of course, there are many people who are not convinced about it, especially since the news was created by a man from interior. “Cover-up” is what many people thought off when they heard that NASA decided to be unsupportive about the news.  However, the answer might be simpler than that. The spokespeople from NASA said that the agency can not stand behind such a claim until they make further investigations about it. Sure, the one who made sensations throughout the world this weekend works at NASA, but that does not mean that he is right. The problem is that Hoover did not notify the agency about this paper, and that caught them off guard. Suddenly TV channels from all over the world started to broadcast the news, presenting it as fact, and not as a probability.

They were bombarded with questions and they did not know how to answer them. The TV channels were not the ones who got interested in the news; the top scientists from all over the world wanted to see the samples as well. They were really hoping about something really interesting. After all, the news was made by NASA, NASA would not make such statements if they would not have a grain of truth would it? The scientists quickly found flaws in the paper submitted by Hoover, and they quickly realized that the paper had the sole purpose of gaining the attention of the media. The official NASA scientists started examining the meteorites, and by Monday they stated that the paper was not true. The paper stated that the holes from the meteorites were made by bacteria, but the biologists who analyzed them said that it is not true. They said however, that the holes look as if they were made by bacteria, but that does not mean that bacteria caused them. The biologists and the astronomers quickly pointed out that the paper was not written in collaboration with other researchers, which makes it to lose its veracity.

The paper was published on a website which seems to be in the danger of being shut down. The researchers believe that the reason why the manager of the website accepted to publish the journal was in order to gain attention and to find a buyer for it. Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, said that the article was pretty interesting, but that it was very obvious that it lacked the scientific research. It was fantasy, and enjoyable fantasy, but the things written in it could not be accepted as facts. More than 12 scientists were asked by the Associated Press to analyze the paper, and all of them said that it is very obvious that the things written in it were written just to shock. This was not the first incident of this kind, as the same thing happened in 1996 when NASA claimed that they found a meteorite in Antarctica which contained alien life.

Needles to say, the news from 1996 made a bigger splash, as in that case the announcement was made by the agency itself. Carl Pilcher, the NASA Astrobiology Institute Director, said on Monday that people should not believe Hoover, and that they should trust the other researchers who analyzed the paper and who infirmed the facts written in it. Hoover posted his paper on the website on Friday, and in it he said that the bacteria found on the meteorite must come from outer space. The meteorites were old, they were found in 1806 and 1864 (France), and in 1938 (Tanzania). So far, Hoover has not returned any calls or e-mails, explaining himself about the paper he wrote. Rudy Schild, who is a Harvard astronomer and who was the editor-in-chief of the journal, said that the main purpose of the paper was to generate debate, which it managed to accomplish. There are lots of theories about alien life forms, many people believing that life here on Earth was brought by a meteorite. Schild said that the paper written by Hoover has some flaws, but that even so, he agrees with the things which were written in it.

However, the majority of the people criticized him for the paper he wrote, accusing him of pretending to be an expert in a field he is not related to. He works at NASA as a solar physics expert, yet in the paper he talks about astrobiology, without having any knowledge of the domain. Harry McSween, one of the biggest experts in meteorites from the world said that the meteorites which Hoover examined were most likely contaminated by bacteria from the Earth, especially the one which was found in 1806, as it is kept in very poor conditions. This means that even if the meteorite contained bacteria, the bacteria were from Earth, and it wasn’t alien as the paper suggested.11