Harvard physicist plans long-shot mission to prove meteorite is alien probe
A prominent Harvard physicist has planned an ambitious expedition to Papua New Guinea to search for the remnants of a meteorite that he thinks could be an alien probe.
Avi Loeb announced that he is organizing the $1.5 million mission to the Pacific island nation to find fragments from CNEOS1 2014-01-08, which slammed into Earth in 2014 after a journey from outside our solar system.
“Within a couple of months, I will be leading an expedition to collect the fragments of the first interstellar meteor. This meteor is the first near-Earth object ever detected by humans from outside the solar system,” he wrote on Medium.
The scientist — who wrote “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” in 2021 — said the meteorite, which is made up of an extremely hard material, may not be a meteorite at all.
Loeb described the expedition as justified but not without risk, the Daily Beast reported.
“There is a chance it will fail,” he said, adding that his team could end up recovering fragments — but they may turn out to be natural in origin rather than artificial.
With the assistance of the US military, Loeb and his team have narrowed down the meteorite’s likely impact zone to an area less than half a square mile in the ocean off the coast of Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.
He said they may discover tiny fragments that could turn out to be “technological,” meaning manufactured, thus providing solid evidence of the existence of aliens.
If not, the remnants may be found to be made of some kind of never-before-seen super-strong material such as a metal forged from a neutron star, the collapsed core of a supergiant star.
“We have a boat. We have a dream team, including some of the most experienced and qualified professionals in ocean expeditions,” Loeb wrote on Medium in late January.
“We have complete design and manufacturing plans for the required sled, magnets, collection nets and mass spectrometer. And most importantly, today we received the green light to go ahead,” he added, referring to the approval by Papua New Guinea.
Loeb — head of the Galileo Project, which seeks evidence of extraterrestrial technological artifacts — also has argued that a football field-size object named Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “scout”) that whizzed by our planet in 2017 also may have been an alien probe.
Loeb has managed to persuade the Pentagon to release the full data for the 2014 fireball, called CNEOS1 2014-01-08, which it said might be the hardest meteorite on record.
“Analyzing the composition of the fragments could allow us to determine whether the object is natural or artificial in origin,” he wrote.
“The confirmation of our discovery of the first interstellar meteor was recognized by CNN as one of ‘2022’s extraordinary cosmic revelations and moments in space exploration,’” Loeb added.
He noted optimistically that it’s possible the remnants “are tough because they are artificial in origin, resembling our own interstellar probes but launched a billion years ago from a distant technological civilization.”
Loeb added: “In case we recover a sizable technological relic from the Pacific Ocean, I promised the curator of the Museum of Modern Art, Paula Antonelli, that I will bring it for display in New York.”
