Harvard professor and notorious UFO hunter Avi Loeb claims he has new evidence that meteor fragments recovered from the ocean floor are alien technology, Boston Public Radio reports, pushing back against detractors who argue their origins are more mundane.
“It raises the possibility that it may have been a Voyager-like meteor, artificially made by another civilization,” Loeb told the station on Monday, referencing an actual pair of probes sent screaming out of the solar system by NASA back in the 1970s.
Though perhaps best known for his provocative theories on the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua that passed through our solar system back in 2017, Loeb’s latest findings concern another interstellar oddity which, unlike Oumuamua, found its way to Earth — albeit not in one piece.
Dubbed IM1, the meteor plunged into the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea nearly a decade ago, but was overlooked until Loeb spearheaded efforts that confirmed in 2022 that it was the first interstellar object known to fall to Earth.
In hot pursuit, the astrophysicist launched an expedition to comb the ocean floor for the object last year and found, he claims, its remnants in the form of spherical metal fragments, or “spherules,” that he thinks could suggest IM1 might be some form of alien technology.
Those findings, documented in a paper published in October, were met with skepticism. Some scientists rebutted that the spherules were the result of fallout from human nuclear testing, or even just coal ash.
Not so easily deterred, Loeb told Boston Public Radio he’s released new findings to silence the skeptics, concluding in his preprint paper that some of the spherule’s “chemical composition differs from any known solar system material.”
“What we did is compare 55 elements from the periodic table in coal ash to those special spherules that we found,” he told the station. “And it’s clearly very different.”
Loeb also appeared to have a message for the haters.
“It’s not based on opinions,” he added. “And, of course, if you’re not part of this scientific process and you are jealous of the attention that it gets, then you can raise a lot of criticism.”
His near indefatigable search for evidence of alien life won’t end there. Off the back of a fruitful, Netflix-documented expedition and a year in which public hysteria over UFOs reached a fever pitch, Loeb is gearing up for another trip back to the Pacific, hoping to find bigger fragments.
Still, for all the headlines he’s made for scouring the ocean floor, Loeb believes our best bet of finding extraterrestrials remains in the sky. In particular, he cautions that his scientific peers, often fixated on the farthest reaches of the cosmos, shouldn’t overlook what’s in our solar system.
“The best approach to figure it out is actually to do the scientific work of building observatories that look out and check what these objects are,” he told Boston Public Radio. “And if they happen to be birds, or airplanes, or Chinese balloons, so be it.”
“But we need to figure it out, it’s our civil duty as scientists,” he added.
