Comments on Hoover's findings made by Elena Naimark, Doctor of Biology of Russian Academy of Science, Leading research associate of Laboratory of Most Ancient Organisms of Institute of Palaeontology:
"Right now there is no reliable evidence proving that all those objects are of extraterrestrial origin. No such thing. It's all speculative ideas at the moment."
She noted that there are two most serious problems jeopardizing correct interpretation.
"It still can be terrestrial contamination. We don't know how fast and how deep can terrestrial bacteria infiltrate rock material. This is why terrestrial contamination is difficult to distinct from real spaceborn immigrants. And at the moment he have no real way to tell the difference", said Miss Naimark.
Also, geological and chemical processes in the minerals can play a low-down trick to researchers.
"At micro-level, mineralization may produce abilogical objects looking very much like organisms. Crystallizing of some mineral solutions may mimic living organisms to really dumbfounding precision. We don't know much about processes of crystallizing and microscopic scale."
According to Naimark, healthy scepticism never harms in such doubtful cases. Hoover's findings will be discussed over at the conference, and three quarters of what he brings forth is likely to be debunked by specialists, she believes.
Naimark also noted that in addition to possibility of terrestrial contamination, property of the researcher's equipment may also produce distortions of image and affect the research methods.
"Many times we've been getting quite surprising results because we didn't take peculiarity of our own equipment into account. For instance, depth of penetration of the electron beam used for chemical analysis is very well known, it's 1-2 micrometers. That's why if the examined object is less than this size, we naturally examine the support surface underneath the object and not the object itself. Many scientists fell over such a simple obstacle."
She added, that today there is no real way to tell the age of a particular bacterium fossil. It's very difficult to tell difference between an organism that fossilized ten thousands or billion years ago.
"We are running a project that involves distingushing of fossilization time of bacteria remnants. This is a very important project, and one its purpose is to make a step towards real timing of fossilization and it may help to tell of those bacteria were fossilized in space or at Earth, and when", - concluded the scientist.
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