CROPfm Forum

From 25 July to 23 September 2001, red rain sporadically fell on the southern Indian state of Kerala. Heavy downpours occurred in which the rain was coloured red, staining clothes with an appearance similar to that of blood. Yellow, green, and black rain was also reported. Coloured rain had been reported in Kerala in as early as 1896 and several times since then.

It was initially announced that the rains were coloured by fallout from a hypothetical meteor burst, but a study commissioned by the Government of India found that the rains had been coloured by airborne spores from a locally prolific terrestrial alga. Other explanations were proposed but not until early 2006 did the coloured rains of Kerala gain widespread attention in the popular media. A controversial conjecture that the coloured particles were extraterrestrial cells was proposed by Godfrey Louis and Santhosh Kumar of the Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam. No information to support the extraterrestrial hypothesis has been published since 2006.