Harvard professor Avi Loeb retrieves potential 'alien artifact' from Pacific Ocean
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Could alien technology be hiding in our planet's oceans?
Harvard professor Avi Loeb, who famously suggested the 'Oumuamua interstellar object observed in 2017 was an alien spacecraft rather than a cigar-shaped space rock, believes he and his team may have recovered parts of an interstellar object from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
According to a BBC report, Loeb used a tentacle-like contraption called an "interstellar hook" to fish for potential interstellar rock samples on the ocean floor. And he may have found something important.
Searching for alien technology on the sea floor
In 2021, Loeb founded the Galileo Project, which aims to build a global network of cameras and telescopes with the express goal of capturing a high-definition image of a UFO. Last year, Loeb claimed we could see such an image "within two years."
Though that has yet to happen, Loeb has been hard at work looking for fragments of an anomaly dubbed IM1. 1M1 is a strange meteorite that exploded over the Pacific Ocean at 3.05 am local time on January 9, 2014.
Loeb strongly believes it came from outside our Solar System. For one, it crashed into the Pacific at an incredible speed. Secondly, he and his team performed an initial analysis suggesting the meteor was tougher than all other 272 meteors in NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies catalog.
After its entry into Earth's atmosphere, the Department of Defense confirmed the location in which it fell into the ocean, giving Loeb and his team a rough search radius.
Three months ago, a report in The Guardian explained that Loeb was planning a $1.5 million expedition from Papa New Guinea to search for fragments of the meteor at a depth of 1.7km on the ocean floor. Not only that, he believes the space rock may be a technological "alien artifact".
"Analyzing the composition of the fragments could allow us to determine whether the object is natural or artificial in origin," Loeb wrote in a Medium post two months ago.
Loeb also pointed out that one of the reasons the meteor might be so tough is "because they are artificial in origin… launched a billion years ago from a distant technological civilization."
Did Avi Loeb's team find an "alien artifact"
On June 21, Loeb's team reportedly discovered tiny spherical fragments called "spherules" that were made of an unusual combination of iron, magnesium, and titanium.
Spherules aren't unusual, the BBC report explains. In fact, they are commonly created when meteorites or asteroids violently explode.
Still, Loeb wrote in his Medium blog that the spherules his team found have "a composition of mostly iron with some magnesium and titanium but no nickel," adding that "this composition is anomalous compared to human-made alloys, known asteroids, and familiar astrophysical sources."
Further research is required, though, and Loeb's team will now analyze the samples with a spectrometer at Harvard to identify any isotopes within, before presenting their findings to the world.
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