In January of 2014, the astronomy world lit up with news of an interstellar object colliding with Earth. Tracking the meteor's signal, scientists determined the interstellar visitor landed somewhere in the Pacific ocean.
Then in 2023, scientists discovered a signal from a seismometer in Papa New Guinea, which gave an indication where the meteor may have touched down. They also discovered some metal at the bottom of the ocean thought to be the meteor in question.
Shockingly, in the research publication analyzing the material, they even went so far as to use the phrase "extraterrestrial technological origin" when describing the meteor.
Another possibility is that this unfamiliar abundance pattern may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin.
It wasn't just any run-of-the-mill astronomer making the bold claim either.
It was Avi Loeb, the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University's — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011 - 2020).
If you haven't heard of Loeb's obsession with aliens, we've covered him a few times over the years.
In July 2023, the media reported that these "interstellar" particles of alien tech weren't actually confirmed to be part of the meteoroid but were just "spherules" of metal they found by dragging a magnet behind their boat.
Still, Loeb believed that what could be alien technology was in our grasp.
Except there was one problem.
The signal Loeb and his team used to pinpoint the meteoroid's landing site was just a truck driving by the observatory, and that threw everything out of wack.
Sound waves thought to be from a 2014 meteor fireball north of Papua New Guinea were almost certainly vibrations from a truck rumbling along a nearby road, new Johns Hopkins University - lead research shows.
Have you ever seen a more devastating lede?
It turns out the observatory records that exact signal every time a truck drives by.
"The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer," said Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins who led the research. "It's really difficult to take a signal and confirm it is not from something. But what we can do is show that there are lots of signals like this, and show they have all the characteristics we'd expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we'd expect from a meteor."
And that bit of "alien technology" on the ocean floor?
Well, the John Hopkins researchers won't go so far as to call the Harvard researchers stupid, but they do imply something along those lines:
"The fireball location was actually very far away from where the oceanographic expedition went to retrieve these meteor fragments," he said. "Not only did they use the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place.
"Whatever was found on the sea floor is totally unrelated to this meteor, regardless of whether it was a natural space rock or a piece of alien spacecraft — even though we strongly suspect that it wasn't aliens," Fernando added.
Gotta love Harvard's descent into a clown show on all fronts!
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