London, November 26 (ANI): A leaked NASA report has disclosed that microscopic Martians arrived on planet Earth about 13,000 years ago, hitching a ride on a meteorite that smashed into the wastes of the Antarctic.

According to a report in The Sun, the meteorite, called Allen Hills 84001, made headlines in 1996 after fossils were found in it.

Most space boffins reckoned they were bacteria from Earth that contaminated the rock while it lay in the frozen wastes.

But a leaked NASA report now says there is powerful evidence they originated on Mars.

“Many scientists argued that what looked like fossils in the meteorite were really caused by the explosive event, such as an asteroid impact, that blasted the rock out of Mars in the first place,” Dr Emily Baldwin, deputy editor of the UK’s Astronomy Now magazine, told The Sun.

“But the NASA team is now saying they have proved that they could not have been produced by the blast itself,” she said.

“If the features turn out to have an extra-terrestrial, biological origin and were not formed during the 13,000 years the meteorite spent lying on Earth, this will have profound implications for our understanding of how life evolved in the solar system,” she added.

At the heart of the NASA work, led by Kathie Thomas-Keprta, were carbonate discs and tiny magnetite crystals inside the space rock.

The scientists were able to use high-resolution electron microscopes that were not available 13 years ago.

They concluded that “unusual chemical and physical properties” in the meteorite were “intimately associated within and throughout these carbonate disks”.

According to them, that was evidence of interaction with water on Mars more than 3.5 billion years ago.

Vast oceans may have covered the planet then and it was much more like Earth than the dusty desert it is today. (ANI)