[jerf]

What flags this for me is that if you have an organism in hand, it's easy to do more analysis to provide evidence that it is not terrestrial. At the moment, I'd still say that the hypotheses of "their probes was contaminated", "our model of what particles are in the stratosphere are wrong and this is fully terrestrial life", and "they're flat-out lying" remain higher odds based on this evidence than "they found extraterrestrial life". In our own atmosphere.

They even mention a test they could run, but they did not wait to run the test before announcing. Not a good sign. Especially since that is not a lengthy test to run, compared to the speed of publication....

I of course reserve the right to change my mind based on more evidence; I have no problem with the idea that our stratosphere models may be wrong, for instance, and if extraterrestrial really is raining down on our stratosphere, so be it. Let facts be the judge. But some sort of biochemical or isotope evidence this is not just another extremophile would be nice.

[anigbrowl]

I would buy the stratospheric model being wrong, but assuming good faith I think they've addressed the contamination objection - you'll note that they did a control with the same procedures except for opening the sample drawer and it came back clean. This is highly reproducible so I'm going to assume they're reporting in good faith.

[jerf]

Flat-out lying was mentioned last because I rate it the lowest. But also non-zero. This is a field that has had many more liars than discoveries, though certainly when there are zero discoveries to be made in the search space we've had access to so far that says less than it might otherwise.