We’re All Aliens Now

posted at 10:02 am on March 6, 2011 by Jazz Shaw

Fox News has been trumpeting yet another breakthrough discovery of fossilized bacterial life found inside of a meteorite. Of course, if lifeforms really have been showering down upon the Earth from the stars since the beginning of the solar system, it kind of gives a whole new meaning to the old Weather Girls disco hit, It’s Raining Men.

Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites — only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth.

Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover is convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites, the remains of living organisms from their parent bodies — comets, moons and other astral bodies. By extension, the findings suggest we are not alone in the universe, he said.

While interesting, Gawker quickly threw cold water all over the story, claiming that this is far from a new story and the author of the paper has been questioned about such claims many times in the past.

As much as we love aliens, this is not news. Hoover has been claiming to have fossil evidence of alien bacterial life for years. Here he is in 2004, on some website called panspermia.org, with the exact same ‘discovery’ reported in today’s Fox News article

And in 2007 presented a paper at a conference for the Society of Professional Instrumentation Engineers titled “Microfossils of cyanobacteria in carbonaceous meteroites”—same findings, same meteorite. Just last month in a press release by the Journal of Cosmology, Dr. Hoover crowed that “We have found fossil evidence of microbes in meteors which are older than this solar system.”

It’s not a new idea, but it’s still intriguing. Those who follow these things are probably already familiar with the concept of panspermia. The theory holds that the galaxy – and perhaps the entire universe – is far from being dead and empty, but actually chock full of bacterial level life riding around on comets, meteors and other space debris. And as proto-planets form, these cosmic hitchhikers crash land on any available surface and kick off the evolution of life, molding their progeny to fit the local environment.

If true, then every chunk of rock in the cosmos could be bristling with living things, each sharing the same root DNA sequences. So when our new alien overlords do eventually land and demand to be taken to see Obama, they might look a lot more like us than, say, Sigourney Weaver’s nemesis in the 1979 classic, Alien.

So here’s the big photo op for ET. What say you? Is this life? Or is it the result of handing Ron White an etch-a-sketch after one too many glasses of scotch?

Recently in the Green Room:

• Can we please stop glorifying pimps?
• “I don’t think you’d find…even a small number of Republicans voting for any kind of bill that has amnesty first and enforcement second”
• Photo of the day
• Programming note: Hosting the Hugh Hewitt Show this week
• It’s come to this: Democrats now complaining that … the Senate hasn’t passed a budget

Blowback