Donald Barber was an astronomer at Norman Lockyer Observatory. Its telescopes sat on a grassy hill surrounded by farmland on the south coast of England. Barber was using the telescopes to measure the light from far-off stars. He captured the starlight in photographs produced on glass plates coated with chemicals, like the film in an old camera. It was only after Barber developed those photographic plates in the summer of 1937 that the first signs of tiny alien invaders emerged.
As Barber developed his photographs, he found they were ruined. Thousands of strange black dots covered the images. Barber looked at the glass plates through a microscope and discovered the culprit: At the center of each black dot was a tiny island of life, a clump of single-celled bacteria too small for the unaided eye to see.
Barber figured out that the germs were drifting down from the sky and into a rooftop tank of water that he drew from to develop his pictures. The bacteria had unusual abilities. Somehow they could grow in the poisonous chemicals on the photographic plates — chemicals that killed most other living things. When Barber sent some of the germs to a government lab, the researchers there told him that they had never seen bacteria like these before.
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