Allan Hills 84001

Right, right.

And no doubt you'll remember the clips of Bill Clinton that are in contact, and that goes back to ALH 84001.

I don't like to get sort of overly critical.

You know, science is a self-correcting process, and that announcement about the Martian meteorite was that perhaps... made a little too early with too much confidence, maybe, but it was super exciting at the time and quite robust at the time, at least given the work that the folks had done.

Still, Mars kept dangling hope.

In 1996, a photo of meteorite ALH 84001 made headlines.

The rock itself was over four billion years old, from a time when Mars had liquid water on its surface.

Under the electron microscope, tiny structures emerged resembling bacterial colonies.

They litter its plains and are distinctive and well-preserved.

One of particular interest was discovered in 1984, Allan Hills 84001, an ancient four-billion-year-old meteorite believed to have originated from the planet Mars.

In 1996, a team of scientists highlighted unusual markings in the object, which they claimed resembled the imprints of fossilized microbes in rocks here on Earth.

The idea that such an old yet life-bearing meteorite could have reached us from Mars briefly sparked a worldwide frenzy that even drew acknowledgement from then US President Bill Clinton.

They were blasted off the Martian surface by ancient impacts, drifted through space for millions of years, and eventually fell here.

One of them, a potato-sized rock found in Antarctica and given the name ALH84001, became, for a while, the most famous rock in the world.

in 1996 a team of nasa scientists announced that this martian meteorite contained what might be the fossilized traces of ancient martian microbial life inside the rock were tiny tube-shaped and segmented structures that under a powerful microscope looked strikingly like fossilized bacteria There were organic molecules.

There were tiny crystals of a mineral that, on Earth, is often produced by bacteria.