Harvard University professor Avi Loeb and his team of researchers claim to have found microscopic remnants of an “alien spacecraft” at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
The fragments are part of a meteor that struck the earth at abnormally high speed, back in 2014, leading the US Department of Defence to believe it to be of interstellar origin.
Avi Loeb had launched a dredging project two weeks ago to explore the depths of the Pacific searching for signs of this ‘interstellar meteor’ -- labeled "IM1"-- that had crashed off the coast of Papua New Guinea. He said his team collected 50 microscopic spherules that look like specks of dust and weigh a total of 35 milligrams during the $1.5 million expedition.
Loeb was quoted as saying by Fox News Digital that the object is tougher and has material strength that is higher than all the space rocks that were cut along by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) which makes it quite unusual.
Often called Harvard’s ‘alien hunter,’ Loeb now believes the microscopic objects are most likely made from a steel-titanium alloy that is much stronger than the iron found in regular meteors. Further testing on the object is required, but according to Loeb, the objects either have interstellar origins or have been manufactured by an extraterrestrial civilisation.
"Given IM1’s high speed and anomalous material strength, its source must have been a natural environment different from the solar system, or an extraterrestrial technological civilization," Loeb said. He wrote in his most recent Medium essay that after analysing the collected materials' composition, the team will report the data in a paper submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. "The interpretation will be left to follow-up papers," he wrote.
Avi Loeb, who headed Harvard's astronomy department from 2011 to 2020, now manages the university's Galileo Project, which is establishing open-sourced observatories around the world to search for evidence of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and interstellar objects.
Loeb has long been a controversial figure in the scientific community due to his belief that aliens have visited Earth. In his 2021 book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, Loeb argued that Oumuamua, a football field-sized space rock visible from telescopes for 11 days in 2017, could only have been an interstellar probe built by aliens.