Is This Our First Alien Encounter?

Bet you never thought ET would look like this — or that we'd find him hitching a ride on a weather balloon

But that is exactly what a team from the University of Sheffield says happened, according to a new paper in the Journal of Cosmology. Professor Milton Wainright launched a balloon with special sterile studs that would only deploy when it reached the stratosphere, then retract on the way down.

The studs came back loaded with "biomorphs" — tiny organisms never before seen on Earth, and too large to be thrown into the atmosphere via anything short of a violent volcano eruption. There have been no major volcanoes in the past half-decade Read more...