'Blood-Red Rain' Pours Down In Remote Siberian City Parking Lot

In a shocking weather event, "blood red" rain fell in a parking lot in the Russian city of Norilsk, in the Siberia region, on June 30, which led the locals to fear it signalled an imminent apocalypse or a biblical plague.

Video footage of the rain showed cars parked next to a nickel and copper processing facility soaked in a blood-red rain.

“It is like a horror movie. There was bloody rain,” a witness said, Express reported.

Metal giant Nornickel, which owns the processing facility, conducted a probe on the incident and claimed the rain was caused by a clean-up operation and had nothing to do with pollution.

The company said it had been carrying out a clean-up and iron oxide had been removed from the factory floor and roof. All the material was ready to be taken away but a wind blew it over the parking lot during the downpour, causing it to fall as red rain over the car park area.

“The collected reddish dust was prepared for disposal, but has not been disposed of until today,” the spokesperson said, Russian international television network RT News reported.

Residents of the city feared the rain could be hazardous; however, health officials were quick to point out the red rain did not possess any risk.

Norilsk is one of the most polluted places in the world, and nickel and metal mining as well as processing are the main sources of pollution.

The city is also the home to world's largest heavy metal smelting complex, with more than 4 million tons of cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, arsenic, selenium and zinc released into the air every year.

In the past, the Indian state of Kerala also received blood colored rain on numerous occasions from July 25 to Sept. 23, 2001.

Eye-witnesses then said the rain was accompanied by loud thunderclaps and flashes of lighting. Many leaves turned grey and appeared to be burnt after the rain.

Godfrey Louis, a physicist at the nearby Cochin University of Science and Technology, collected samples of the red rain and found it was filled with red cells but was surprised to find no evidence of DNA in these cells, Mystery of India reported.

Louis published his results in the peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space in 2006, along with the tentative suggestion that the “cells could be extraterrestrial, perhaps from a comet that had disintegrated in the upper atmosphere and then seeded clouds as the cells floated down to Earth.”

“As the days pass, I’m getting more and more convinced that these are exceedingly unusual biological cells. The Red Rain cells of 2001 multiply under extreme heat and were found not to contain DNA,” astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe who studied the cells at Cardiff University, Wales, said.

Large amounts of nickel, manganese, titanium, chromium and copper were found in the red drops by the National Centre for Earth Science Studies in Kerala during the study.