Paper: The Chronicle-telegram
City: Elyria, Oh
Date: Saturday, August 24, 1963
Page: 17
'Life in space' stories once basis for hoax...but now??
(EDITOR'S NOTE: One hundred years ago, a meteorite fell in France. Now
a century later, scientists have found in this meteorite and others proof
that life exists on other worlds. Their evidence...fossils that seem so
much like plants and animals the experts doubt they possibly could be
anything else....im a discovery that one day may be acclaimed as one of the
great biological breakthroughs in history. The secon din this fascinating
series describes some long-ago speculation about life in space and details
the latest discoveries._
By GARDNER SOULE
Philosophers in ancient Greece, at least 600 years before the birth of
Christ, speculated out loud whether there was life on other worlds. Men
always have wondered.
In the 19th Century, improved astronomical telescopes led to the
discovery of straight lines on the face of the planet Mars. The lines were
called canals, and they caused a flurry of discussion about space life.
Today, some scientists believe the lines on Mars may be bands of
vegetation...living matter...instead of canals.
The speculation about extraterrestrial life reached a high point (or
perhaps a low point) in 1835, when readers of the old New York Sun were
victims of one of the most elaborate hoaxes in history. The paper
fictitiously reported an astronomer, working at the Cape of Good Hope, South
Africa, have observed real life on the moon.
The stories described that moon life: There were, according to the
reports, horned sheep, gray pelicans, a ball-shaped beast that rolled across
a beach. Buffaloes with wold that covered their eyes as a protection
against the sun were described in detail. Cranes, three-foot-long zebras
and a beaver that walked on two feet, carried its young in its arms and
could build a fire...all were included in a series of stories that fired the
imagination of Sun readers. A bat-man allegedly existed. His name, the Sun
said, was "Vespertiliohorno"...there was no report on how the name was
accertained.
The moon's mountains, lakes and volcanic craters were described.
The paper's circulation zoomed from 4,000 copies a day to more than
20,000 on the strength of its fiction about the moon.
So 19th-Century Americans could only talk (and pull each other's legs)
about life in space. But today, bona-fide scientists are getting serious.
The first Americans ever to behold what may well prove to be the first
fossil animal or plant from space was not a space man. He was a researcher.
He was perring through a microscope when he was it.
George Claus, a microbiologist of New York University. was the man.
Not long ago, while making an examination of a piece of a meteorite, he came
upon the outline of what appeared to have been a living animal or plant.
Claus was looking at a sample of the Orgueil meteorite, which arrived
from space at the town of Orgueil, in France, in 1864. The same cosmic body
had already yielded the first sign of life from space that scientists of
today have announced. A chemical compound like some produced only by living
beings had been found in the meteorite by Warren G. Meinschein of Esso
Research and Batholomew Nagy and Douglas Nennessy of Fordham University.
Meinschein, Nagy, and Hennessy then persuaded Claus to take a
microscropic look at the Orgueil meteorite. Claus did - and went further.
He also examined three other meteorites that had fallen at different times
in Tanganyika, Africa; in India and in France.
In all four, Claus found what look like tiny fossils - microfossils, as
the scientists fall them.
One of the fossils seems to have folded wings, like a bird's.
Another appears to be a jet-propelled creature - a pinpoint-size animal
that moved by means of jet, as does the far larger octopus.
Some of the little space animals or plants apparently were caught by
death in the act of cell division...dividing into two animals, the way
one-celled creatures on earth reproduce themselves.
Some are single-celled structures that resemble, but not exactly, algae
(plants ) found on earth.
There is a six-sided fossil that seems to have arms or legs sticking
out of its center section. It is about 20-millionths of a millimetor in
diameter.
Altogether, Claus and his assistants discovered 25 different fossils.
Not one of them, so far as Claus could tell, was a fossil known on earth.
At this point, a sample of the Orgueil meteorite was sent to an
acknowledged expert on the world's microfossils; Dr. Frank Staplin of the
laboratory of Imperial Oil Limited at Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Staplin verified the fossils the Claus team had found were not of this
earth. Not only that, he spied some some: Six additional species of little
animals or plants from space, making a total of 31.
In spite of his knowledge of earth fossils, Dr. Staplin did not
recognize those in the meteorite.
Not all scientists today believe the meteorite fossils once were living
creatures. There is, some scientists point out, a possibility the tiny
particles were made instead by natural or chemical process, as pressures and
heat inside the earth form diamonds.
This may be so. The fossils look to many scientists, however, so
animal - or plant-like they scarecely could be anything else.
Some scientists believe the microscopic fossils were introduced into
the meteorites after the meteorites reached the earth. In that case,
presumably, they could be identified as earth fossils. Staplin could not
identify them as such.
But two University of Chicago scientists, Edward Anders, associate
professor of physics, and Frank F. Fitch, an assistant professor of
pathology, expressed the belief some at least of the particles of the
Orgueil meteorite were ragweed, juniper, or unidentified pollen, and starch
grains - all of which got into the meteorite in the laboratory.
To this, the Fordham men and NYU's Claus replied their fossils were
embedded in minerals indigenous to the meteorite and earthly objects could
not have worked into it that way; they also said they had done their
analysis by means that prevented contamination in the laboratory.
Robert Ross of the British Museum (Natural History), London, came into
the argument on the side of the genuineness of the space fossils.
Ross saud he'd found some, too.
He looked at still another fragment of the Orgueil meteorite.
(Altogether, there are 50 bits of the Orgueil meteorite distributed in
meseums around the globe.) He discovered in it little umbrella - or
mushroom-shaped objects.
If these microscopic mushrooms had been found on earth, he said, there
would have been no question but that they were of biotic (living) origin.
He also found other objects that somewhat resembled fossil
hystrichosphaeres. They are tiny sea animals.
Ross said he used sterile instruments to scrape away the surface of his
pieces of the Orgueil meteorite. He extracted the sample he studied from
its interior. Thus he did not risk contamination by earth particles. They
could not, he said, have worked into the inside of the meteorite.
That the Orgueil meteorite should attract so much scientific attention
at the time was not surprizing. It had attracted wide public attention when
it arrived.
This particular messenger from space burst over France with a great
flash of light and exploded with a prolonged crack of thunder. Thousands of
people observed it. Dozens hastened to pick up pieces. Some fragments were
still hot and smoking when they were recovered. Some of today's scientists
have found their signs of life well beneath the blackened outer shell of the
Orgueil meteorite.
No one yet has found human beings on other plants. No intelligent life
has been discovered. We have not discovered N. G. Well's bug-eyed monsters.
Nor have we found the little green men of other science fiction writers.
But a recent book, "Life in the Universe," by Patrick Moore and Francis
Jackson (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.) explains: "Our hypothetical three or
four-headed, multilegged creatures would be made up of the same elements as
we are. Like ourselves, they would required an adequate supply of water,
and a restricted range of environmental temperature."
What the scientists, starting with Meinschein and his group, have found
is that chemicals produced only by living things do exist in meteorites.
Therefore, presumably, the living beings to produce them exist wherever the
meteorites come from. And they have found, if their fossils are genuine,
that some simple and primitive creatures are, or were, alive on other
worlds. On other planets, just as on this one, simple and primitive
creatures may well be associated with more complicated life.
"The suggestion that somewhere in the universe," say authors Moore and
Jackson, "there may be a race of intelligent beings with three heads each
and a dozen legs in not necessarily absurd.
NEXT WEEK: Reporter Soule tells how...almost by accident.....United States
scientists got on the trail of life in space.
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