[meteorite-list] Kerala Red Rain Was From A Comet, Study Suggests

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Jun 6 12:07:34 2006
Message-ID: <002a01c68925$f33bb6d0$f45ae146_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi,


    One of the debunkers of the bat theory as regards the
Red Rain in Kerala said that he calculated that 50 tons of
bat blood would be required to create the Red Rain, an
"impossible" amount, he said.

    That is 100,000 pounds or 1.6 million ounces, which
amounts to roughly 50 million cc's. If you assume a blood
loss in flight over a week or so as 10 cc's, that would
require 5,000,000 bats to be sick (or 1 cc from
50,000,000 bats if you prefer, or 5 cc from 10,000,000
bats...)

    The bat population of one large cave, Carlsbad Cavern,
in the American Southwest was estimated at 8,700,000 in
1936. (It is presently reduced to a million or so, due to
agricultural pesticides and environmental changes.)

    Kerala State is heavily (entirely) forested (jungle). 22.5%
of Kerala is nature preserves. It has many bat species, both
micro-chiropterae and mega-chiropterae, including Pteropus
giganteus with its four-foot wingspan. No shortage of bats
in Kerala, I'm thinking. How much blood in Pteropus
giganteus, which has a body the size of a small cat or
monkey or a big rat?

    From red rain to yellow: The older among us may recall the
"Yellow Rain" controversy at the end of the Vietnam War.
Hmung villages (allies of US) were subject to a yellow rain that
left a yellow residue behind. Sickness was reported. The U.S.,
after analyzing soil samples, accused the Soviets of supplying
the Vietnamese with chemical warfare agents in the form of
synthesized mycotoxins. Antiwar groups accused the U.S.
of spraying Sarin nerve gas on its former allies as an evil
experiment. Entomologists tried to point out that yellow
rain was just bee feces and pollen from vast migrated flocks
of bees and quite common in SE Asia. They were quickly
hooted down as trying to perpetuate a "cover-up" on behalf
of... well, somebody. It couldn't be bees. It HAD to be a
conspiracy! How simple-minded... See:
http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/week/020805.htm

    The yellow rains continue to fall throughout SE Asia,
of course. There was a big flap about colored rains
in Kerala at the time because in addition to the Red
Rain, there was Green Rain, Yellow Rain, Brown Rain,
and Black Rain those weeks. Here's the original news
story before the Red Rain was singled out as Alien Spores:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1465036.stm

    The following year, in mid-June 2002, a yellow-green
rain fell from the sky on the town of Sangrampur, near
Calcutta, India. Rumors spread that the rain might be
contaminated with toxins or chemical warfare agents.
Shortly after the "attack," however, Deepak Chakraborty,
chief pollution scientist for the Indian state of West Bengal,
reported that the yellow-green droplets were in fact
bee feces containing pollen from local mangoes and
coconuts. He concluded that the colored rain may
have been caused by the migration of a giant swarm
of Asian honeybees, which are known to produce
"golden showers."
http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/week/020805.htm#fn1
and reported in Fred Pearce, "Green rain over India
evokes memories of cold war paranoia," New Scientist,
Vol. 174 (June 22, 2002), p. 13.

    Googling "india red rain" currently yields more than
11,000,000 hits, almost all of which are "alien life" oriented.
The silly notion has acquired a vigorous life of its own now
and I'm sure it will pop up over and over again in the decades
to come. "But didn't they find alien spores in some weird rain
somewhere...? I think I read about it on the Internet."

    Martin asks, "if they loose so much blood, wouldn't be
there lying a lot dead bats down and we would have read,
Toxic-Alien-Rain caused mass mortatility among bats...?"

    Few would die in flight. Eventually blood loss would
make them so weak they couldn't fly and they would die
in their caves or secluded roosts, places which humans
(wisely) avoid entering, a private chiropteran tragedy.

    Martin concludes, "Hmm, there isn't "bad science",
only bad thing in this story was, that there was this
publications spread, before the case was sufficient
investigated."

    Publishing before you investigate is not bad science.
It's no science.


Sterling K. Webb
-------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Altmann" <altmann_at_meteorite-martin.de>
To: <Meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>; <sterling_k_webb@sbcglobal.net>;
"'Kevin Forbes'" <vk3ukf_at_hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 9:57 AM
Subject: AW: [meteorite-list] Kerala Red Rain Was From A Comet, Study
Suggests


Hi Sterling, Kevin,

well, I'm not insisting on that meconium-theory, I only thought, that it
would be a possibility very well worth to be checked, simply because such
red meconial rains were observed before and together with the rain, swarms
of insects were observed and the "cells" are looking similar,
so that this in my eyes, if I were a Louis, would try to exclude this
possibility as one of the firsts.

I by my own am even not totally convinced, that necessarily the red liquid
fell from sky.
Funny enough a few weeks ago we could observe in Germany a Yellow Rain :-)
This year we had huge quantities of yellow pollen of conifers,
everything outside was covered with that yellow dust.
One night there was a little rain, only a few drops
and in the morning one could observe on all surfaces nice patterns of wet
pollen, yellow spots and circles, wherefrom one could have the impression
that yellow drops splashed on thise surfaces.

Some hundred years ago, one might would have thought, that it was a
sulphur-rain.
It's a common pattern, that people, if they found something unusal and
plentiful, which suddenly appeared and where they can find no explanation,
and there was a rain, the will connect it with the rain, that the stuff felt
from sky.

There are so many examples of such unusual rain reports from old times on.
Frog rains - even today one can observe it here in Bavaria, that after a
cloudburst with short and strong rain a meadow suddenly teems with tiny tree
frogs, so that one could think, that they felt from sky.
(well, after a rain, when the earthworms are coming out, at least the people
seemed to have drawn the right conclusion, common name of the eartworm in
German is rainworm).
Widely reported in 16th century was the Mice Rain of Bergen in Norway.
I guess with the stron rain, the warrend of the mice and also the cellars
were flooded, so that they came out.
Sulphur rains, may it have been transported Sahara-dust or pollen,
blood rains (one in Hungary with the appearance of insects),
and so on.

Or think to the belief accepted for a long time, that there are liquid
meteorites. Would have to look, wasn't that the jelly found on dew-wet
meadows in the morning (algae?).

So perhaps the rain wasn't red in Kerala, but was coloured by smth. which
was already there on the ground. (If I remember, in one newspaper article,
there was written, that the rain coloures clothes red - but not, that the
drops themselves were red).

Bad blood would be a horrible imagination, how many bats would one need to
squeeze out to have a red rain? They are small. And how would the processes
be, that the blood will mix still in the air with the raindrops?
And if they loose so much blood, wouldn't be there lying a lot dead bats
down and we would have read, Toxic-Alien-Rain caused mass mortatility among
bats...

I love bats, there in Romania, where I'm always staying it is full of bats
(but no red rain). Each night one can hear their electrical whisper in the
clefts of the buildings and when one lays an ear on the hollow trees....

Hmm, there isn't "bad science", only bad thing in this story was, that there
was this publications spread, before the case was sufficient investigated.

Buckleboo!
Martin

-----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: meteorite-list-bounces_at_meteoritecentral.com
[mailto:meteorite-list-bounces_at_meteoritecentral.com] Im Auftrag von Kevin
Forbes
Gesendet: Sonntag, 4. Juni 2006 08:12
An: meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com
Betreff: Re: [meteorite-list] Kerala Red Rain Was From A Comet, Study
Suggests

This is a mystery alright.

I have just as much trouble accepting that several thousands litres of bats
blood made its way into the rain clouds for several months over the same
area as I do for cometary debris containing cells raining down over the
area. ?????

Question, do we know what kind of bats blood this is, and where do they
originate from?

Kevin Forbes, VK3UKF.


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Received on Tue 06 Jun 2006 12:59:10 AM PDT