As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis´s laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens. In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper
in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples-water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis´s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001-contain microbes from outer space.

As SARS evolved from what seemed like a small problem into a global scare, everyone assumed that the virus's spread was abetted by air travel: someone returning from China, for example, carrying SARS to Canada. Few, though, considered the possibility that the vehicle the virus traveled in might have been a comet. Yet to one man, space travel is the best explanation for the disease's spread.