Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb searched the Pacific seafloor last year in search of meteor debris.He said he found metal spherules that "may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin."A new study now suggests Loeb may have been looking for the meteor debris in the wrong place.

Yet another study is calling into question a Harvard professor's claims that metallic balls discovered under the ocean may have been made by aliens.

Last year, Avi Loeb, the director of a computational astrophysics center at Harvard, said metal spherules found in the Pacific Ocean were left behind by a meteor that exploded near Earth in 2014.

He said their bizarre chemical composition "may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin."

His claims were criticized by parts of the scientific community that believed Loeb was making wild assertions without enough evidence to back them up.

Now researchers believe Loeb's costly expedition looking for evidence of extraterrestrial technology on the sea floor might have been more than 100 miles off of its mark because it was misled by seismic data.

Johns Hopkins University-led (JHU-led) research said a blip on the seismometer that Loeb used to pinpoint the crash site may simply have been caused by the vibrations of a passing truck.

If correct, that means exotic metal balls recovered from the sea floor may be unrelated to the outer-worldly rock, Ben Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher at JHU and lead author on the analysis, told Business Insider in an interview.

"It seems highly likely that the place they were searching on the sea floor was incorrect. Therefore, whatever they recovered from the sea floor and thought was from this media actually had nothing to do with it whatsoever," he said.

Pinpointing the crash site

In 2019, Loeb and his team searched databases for unusual meteors that were moving rapidly. That's when they came across a meteoric fireball that arrived in Earth's atmosphere in 2014.

The meteor, dubbed by Loeb's team IM1, was first spotted by the Department of Defense's (DoD) sensors. These said it hit the atmosphere at 27 miles per second, a high speed that suggests the meteor came from outside the solar system.

This left Loeb wondering whether the 2014 object was an extraterrestrial probe. Loeb wanted to recover debris from the object to test his theory.

The DoD suggested a location for the meteor's impact site, which Loeb and his team used as a baseline to track down a 46 square-mile zone where it may have crashed.

Readings from a nearby seismometer were then used to further narrow down their search area to a 6-square-mile area of interest off the coast of Papua new Guinea.

This is where the expedition carried out its search for spherules, characteristic metal balls often left behind by meteors that crash in the atmosphere.

Loeb's team recovered 805 spherules. A 10th of these, according to their analysis, contained unusual levels of three metal elements — beryllium, lanthanum, uranium — and atypical isotopes. This, they said, could point to an interstellar origin.

One hypothesis is that the meteor came from a planet's crust outside the solar system. Loeb went one step further in the paper, stating that it's possible that the bizarre composition means the meteor may be made up of extraterrestrial tech.

A close up of the tiny spherules, seen here in an electron microscope. The bar scale is about 100 micrometers.




Loeb et all, arXiv:2401.09882 [astro-ph.EP] https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2401.09882 CC-BY




Another theory

The JHU-led research, which has not been validated by peers, suggested Loeb and his colleagues misread the seismic readings taken from Papua New Guinea.

They said it could be explained by nearby city noises, rather than shockwaves let off by a meteor crashing nearby.

"It's probably the signal of a truck driving by the seismometer," Fernando said.

Fernando added that the DoD's measurements are notoriously inaccurate when it comes to pinpointing the speed and location of near-Earth objects.

To firm up its theory, the JHU-led team tracked down data from acoustical measuring devices placed in the area. These car-sized microphones are typically used to detect illicit nuclear tests and are finely tuned to detect explosions in the atmosphere, Fernando said.

This analysis, they said, places the location for the meteor about 120 miles from the area Loeb investigated.

"Fundamentally, I think the big difference is that our team has people who study sound waves, people who are seismologists, and people who study fireballs," said Fernando.

"And as far as I know, they don't have any of those three on their team, which it's not to say that they're not entitled to publish on this, but it may have led them to misinterpret or misunderstand the data that they were downloading," he said.

Loeb disagrees with JHU analysis, stating that the seismic readings were only used to confirm data from other sources.

"What arrives at Earth from outside the solar system should be studied by scientists who are serious about paying attention to new data, and not ridiculed by ill-motivated debunkers," he said in a Medium post on Sunday.

The findings will be presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston on Tuesday.

No stranger to controversy

This isn't Loeb's first foray with controversy. The professor first made headlines when he said it was reasonable to assume 'Oumuamua, an interstellar meteor that cruised past the Earth in 2017, might be a wayward piece of alien technology.

The professor's hypotheses have been ruffling feathers among the scientific community, many of whom believe scientists should only put forward theories if they have a solid basis of evidence.

While Loeb has been attracting critiques from peers, he has gained in popularity among tech tycoons and billionaires, who are backing the Galileo Project, Loeb's new alien tech-tracking research institute. The expedition to recover the spherule was fully funded by crypto entrepreneur Charles Hoskinson.

Nevertheless, the JHU analysis adds to a body of criticism raised against the science behind Loeb's expedition.

Some have questioned whether the meteor was interstellar — US Space Force has weighed in to confirm that they believe it was, but not everybody agrees with that analysis.

Others have also suggested that contamination of coal ash runoff from nearby industrial processes could be behind the spherules' peculiar composition.

Loeb disagrees vehemently with these rebuttals and has put forward arguments against each.

Regarding the truck hypothesis, Loeb said he disagreed with the analysis.

"We found that data from other seismometers farther away, does not provide meaningful constraints, whereas the new preprint uses the large uncertainties from these other seismometers to claim that the fireball could have been anywhere across a large region if we were to ignore the DoD localization data," he said.

"There is nothing one could say to people who choose to dismiss reliable DoD information," he said.

Undeterred, Loeb and his team are planning another expedition to detect fragments from interstellar meteors.