Posted by tourdemars to Life on Mars at March 24, 2005 11:32 PM

Carol Stoker thought she was talking casually to friends at a party. A NASA scientist, Stoker and her husband and colleague Larry Lemke described work they were doing looking for biological activity — life — at a site in Spain called Rio Tinto that may be similar to potential habitats on Mars. What happened next is up for debate. Stoker says neither she nor Lemke ever implied that her work could be extrapolated to suggest present life on Mars. She certainly never told anyone that a paper to that effect was about to be published in the journal Nature, she says. Several people at the party, however, later told a journalist that they had said that. The subsequent Space News article set off a brief media frenzy in mid-February that eventually led to a rare official denial from NASA.