Collecting Unrecognizable Beings from the Stratosphere

Noted crank [1] [2] [3] who is associated with noted crank Chandra Wickramasinghe [4] continues to act like a crank.

Dust and tiny micro-organisms are found in the Strat. This is not news.

[1] http://www.skeptical-science.com/tag/milton-wainwright/

[2] http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2013/09/20/debunked...

[3] http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/invasi...

[4] http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/09/20/et_claim...

Pictures begin here in the video: https://youtu.be/cpXVVuFgYqA?t=1820

Here's "the famous one," showing a titanium ball with carbon and oxygen contents spilling out from impact: https://youtu.be/cpXVVuFgYqA?t=2297

And the "snail particle," which is stuck to a crystal of sodium chloride: https://youtu.be/cpXVVuFgYqA?t=2359 "This is comin' in from somewhere, and it ain't comin' up from Salt Lake City."

He shows the images he got in the video at 30:40.

The most sensible explanation is that in each launch they got hundreds of carbon dust dots, and he cherrypicked the most symmetrical and biological like, and then proclaim that they are "biological entity"s.

Some back of the envelope calculations: Let's guess that they have a team of 5 members, and each one looks at the microscope one day each week for 8 hours, and to select and focus a dot they need 1 minute. If they do this for a year they'd get 60x8x5x52 = 1 million samples.

The problem is how to design a control group. Perhaps someone can look at 1 million sand grains and find the more interesting. (This looks like an interesting blog post.) The chemical composition is very different, and the size is very different, but I guess it can test the human filter part.

(Bonus points: Repeat this 1 million of grains of other materials. Salt grains a too cubic to look organic. Soot particles seams more interesting and can be a possible contamination. How does flour looks under a microscope?)

Neat, but I wish he had explicitly stated that he controlled for kit contamination. It doesn't sound like he did. Perhaps the collectors had bacteria on then when they went up, then the combination of low pressure and UV light made them look weird, and voilà: "alien" microbes. Claiming that you work in a clean room and are careful isn't enough, you have to have negative controls.

It's Wainwright time again? Well, here is a debunk, in German

http://scienceblogs.de/astrodicticum-simplex/2013/09/21/lebe...

Key points:

* link to known cranks Chandra Wickramasinghe and Fred Hoyle

* publishes in shady magazines

* specimen is too similar to other life forms on earth

* just because we don't know how they got up there means they come from outer space

In Crichton's The Andromeda Strain [1], we collect something from (sub?)orbit and it does not end well.

[1] www.michaelcrichton.com/the-andromeda-strain/

If this life is DNA based they just need a PCR (+) and sequencing, to see if it is from Earth. Does anyone have a link that discuss if they tried that? (Edit: Listening to the interview, sigh.)

(+) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction