Alien cells live on Earth!

Now that I've got your attention, I'd like to tell you that scientists have discovered cells, unlike anything in our known earthly biology (so alien) that live on Earth - basically exactly what I said in the headline.

Here's the story from Fast Company...hang onto your butts:

In 2001 red-stained rain fell over India. It was mysterious. Scientists found oddly non-Earth-like cells in it. Controversy ensued. Now it's been revealed the cells can reproduce.

For two months in 2001, on and off, red-colored rain fell over Kerala, southern India. One of the many people who observed the phenomenon was physicist Godfrey Louis--he collected a sample to work out where the color came from, suspecting desert dust, which is often responsible for vaguely biblical-seeming events like this.

Except Godfrey discovered something weird was responsible for the color: Biological cells, red in color, that bore no relation to blood cells and contained no DNA. Writing up the discovery in the journal Astrophysics and Space in 2006, Godfrey included the controversial, but scientifically plausible, suggestion that a comet had brought the cells to our solar system from the depths of space, and fragments had descended into Earth's atmosphere as meteorites. The cells could have survived and seeded the clouds that formed the weird red rain.

To say this is a contentious theory is an understatement: Godfrey was asserting that extraterrestrial living entities had arrived on Earth from space. In a serious science publication. With proper, laboratory-based experiments.