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Back in November of 2021, renowned Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb announced that he would be leading a team on an expedition to determine if a meteor that crashed near Australia is actually alien in nature.
The meteor in question, CNEOS1 2014-01-08, exploded and crashed into the southwestern Pacific Ocean in 2014 about 100 miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea near Australia. It is just the third known interstellar object of its kind on Earth.
The fact that it was moving through space at 130,000 mph is one of the factors that scientists used in assessing the space rock’s origin as it was moving significantly faster than the average velocity of meteors normally found in our solar system.
Loeb, chairman of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy from 2011 to 2020, having received a reported $1.5 million in funding for his mission, is currently with his team searching the floor of the Pacific Ocean for debris from the meteor.
Their search has already yielded some interesting results.
“We thought that the harvest of IM1’s site yields the same materials as the control regions away from that site until we noticed a strange curled wire, which we now label IS1–2, (an abbreviation for the second unusual fragment from the first IM1 Run) on top of one of the magnets,” Loeb wrote in a diary he is keeping during the expedition.
“The fundamental question is why was it not washed away by the ocean water as the sled was dragged by the ship, Silver Star. The most plausible explanation is that the volcanic magnetic particles held it in place like a magnet holding a piece of paper in place on a magnetic pad.
“The wire is 8-millimeter long and curved twice with a rigid structure. What is it made of?
“Today, Ryan Weed and Jeff Wynn analyzed in detail this unexpected wire and concluded that its composition is anomalous compared to human-made alloys.”
Loeb has previously stated that he believes alien technology visited Earth back in 2017.
The basis for his belief centers around Oumuamua, a 1,300-foot long cigar-shaped asteroid that first appeared in our solar system in 2017 and baffled scientists and astronomers due to its unique shape and movement.
In 2018, Loeb and Stephen Hawking were seriously investigating at the possibility whether that object could, in fact, be an alien spaceship because, as Loeb explained, scientists want to classify objects such as Oumuamua as a comet or an asteroid because that’s all they know.