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Loeb reported that he found profitable land and recovered hundreds of small blobs of molten material called “spherules” in the ocean off Papua New Guinea. Some of them, he later wrote, had such unknown chemistry that “It may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin.”
But seismic data reanalysis It now suggests that Loeb may have been looking for the meteorite remains in the wrong place.
The analysis, led by seismologist Benjamín Fernando of Johns Hopkins University, maintains that the sound waves supposedly coming from the meteorite exploding in the atmosphere, and quoted by Loeb to help locate the meteorite debris field, Most likely they came from a truck that was driving on a road near the seismometer.
“There are hundreds of signals that look exactly like this on that seismometer in Papua New Guinea in the days before and after,” Fernando said. Additionally, the pattern was more common during the day.
“That is irrefutable proof of a human-made noise,” he said. “Meteors, earthquakes, waves, none of them care about the time of day.”
Explosive meteorite or hospital birth?
After an enigmatic object called ‘Oumuamua passed through the solar system in 2017, astronomers declared that it came from interstellar space. Loeb published an immediately controversial article speculating that it could have an artificial origin and could be a “light sail” designed by an extraterrestrial civilization. Many Scientists saw this as a marginal interpretation of a phenomenon of more plausibly natural origin.
But Loeb pressed on. He is the founder of the Galileo Projectwhose goal is to bring the search for extraterrestrial technology “from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research.”
In 2019, he said, he asked a colleague to search databases for meteors moving at unusual speeds and came across the 2014 meteoric fireball. That led to the search last summer, with Loeb as chief scientist of the expedition.
Loeb has since stated that the chemical composition of some of the spherules found in that search does not resemble anything known in our solar system, and “could have originated from a highly differentiated magma ocean of a planet with an iron core outside the solar system or from more exotic sources.” “
But it has faced obstacles from many mainstream scientists, who generally adhere to the philosophy that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Aliens are a tough sell among scientists today, even if they are a hot topic in congressional hearings and in popular culture. On Friday, the Department of Defense released a lengthy report declaring that there is no evidence that aliens have visited Earth, dismissing the venerable conjecture that the government has secretly recovered extraterrestrial hardware.
The latest wave of skepticism, to be presented next week at a planetary science conference in Houston, examines seismic data that Loeb cited as a factor in deciding where his team would look.
The instrument, on an island near Papua New Guinea, recorded the same pattern of signals in the days before and after the meteorite impact, Fernando said in an interview. He said the measurements are consistent with a truck making regular daytime deliveries to a hospital, stopping for a couple of minutes and then returning along the same road.
A draft by Fernando and his colleagues, which has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a journal, concludes that the material recovered from the seafloor is “almost certainly unrelated” to the meteor.
Loeb, however, remains adamant.
“The seismic data is completely irrelevant to the location of the meteor,” Loeb told the Washington Post.
He said his team based their search coordinates primarily on U.S. military satellite data. A three-year analysis by the US Space Command supported the hypothesis that the meteor’s extreme speed indicated an origin outside our solar system, Loeb said.
Citing a Johns Hopkins University press release about Fernando’s research, Loeb said: “This press release is from people who did no work. They didn’t collect materials, they didn’t analyze anything. They just sit in their chairs and express their opinions.”
In a post on MediumLoeb further responded:
“Astronomers who dismiss the (satellite) data and argue that it must be completely wrong should lose sleep at night because their distrust means their security is not guaranteed and their taxes are wasted on an unreliable national security infrastructure.”
Fernando responded that Satellite data shows two possible meteorite trajectories, and both cannot be correct. He said his team believes the meteor’s supposed speed is the result of a measurement error by a sensor.
“We think the most likely case is that it is a natural meteor from our solar system,” he said.
In any case, Loeb is not done with the search. When he gets enough funding, he told The Post, he will return to the Pacific in search of larger pieces of whatever fell into the sea.