WORLD
NASA scientist Richard Hoover says he has discovered signs of alien life
Baku, March 7 (AZERTAC). The peer-reviewed Journal of Cosmology has reported that a respected NASA scientist has discovered evidence of alien life. According to a statement on the journal`s webiste, astrobiologist Richard Hoover has found fossils of ancient bacteria from colonies that "thrived on comets, moons, and other planets". For more than a decade, he has been studying meteorites in the Antarctic. "Using the most advanced micro-scanning technology in the world, Dr. Hoover fractured fresh slices of the interior of these meteorites, and discovered the remains of several species of cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae," the journal reported. "Blue-green algae have a unique quality, they thrive even under the harshest of conditions."
Hoover has ruled out the possibility of the samples being contaminated. "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," Hoover said in the statement. "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." The results of his research appear in this month's issue of the journal. He found the fossil remains of micro-organisms not so different from ordinary ones found underfoot on Earth. "The exciting thing is that they are in many cases recognisable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth," Dr Hoover said. But not all of them. "There are some that are just very strange and don`t look like anything that I`ve been able to identify, and I`ve shown them to many other experts that have also come up stumped."
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scientist and Journal of Cosmology editor Rudy Schild explained in an editor`s note that more than 5,000 scientists have been invited to review the paper and offer critical analysis. "No other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough vetting, and never before in the history of science has the scientific community been given the opportunity to critically analyze an important research paper before it is published," he added. Schild, who is a big name in the astrophysics community, provided a jacket blurb last year for a book that called on the U.S. government to take UFO reports more seriously. In UFOs: Pilots, Generals and Government Officials Go on the Record (Harmony Books), writer Leslie Kean interviewed numerous high-ranking officials on the topic. The Straight reported last summer that Schild had described Kean`s work as a "terrific book, researched with care and precision". In a sidebar to that article, UBC Okanagan campus astronomer Erik Rosolowsky told the Straight that he believed that life wasn`t confined to Earth. “We`ve found good evidence for prebiotic molecules throughout the universe,” Rosolowsky stated at the time. “These are the kinds of things that feature prominently in organic chemistry, but they are not themselves life.”