Meteor that hit Earth 10 years ago 'may have been made by alien civilisation', expert says – Daily Star
A meteor that hit Earth a decade ago could be ‘billions of years old’ and made by ‘another alien civilisation’ according to an expert, after tests on fragments recovered from the Pacific Ocean
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A meteor that plunged to Earth 10 years ago is "alien" – and could have been made by ET, according to a leading astrophysicist.
Avi Loeb said tests on fragments recovered from the Pacific Ocean suggest their origin is extra-terrestrial. They could be "billions of years old" having travelled to Earth from interstellar space outside the Solar System, he said.
The astronomy professor from prestigious Harvard University in the US – ranked No2 in the world – debunked claims of researchers not involved in the mission that they could be human-produced coal ash.
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Avi, 61, said scientists in three separate labs had analysed the make-up of 850 tiny metallic spheres and found they were unlike anything on Earth.
Up to 10% of the fragments contained "alien" elements not seen in the Solar System. They were a new class of differentiated elemental composition called BeLaU. Its composition included beryllium, lanthanum and uranium – which are found on Earth – but they were arranged in patterns that do not match our planet's alloys.
"What we did was compare the 55 elements from the periodic table in the coal ash to those special pellets we found," he said. "And obviously it's very different. It raises the possibility that it may have been a traveller-like meteorite artificially created by another civilisation."
Avi said the fragments' chemical composition was different from familiar Solar System meteors. "The abundance pattern does not resemble natural materials on the Earth, Moon, Mars or Solar System asteroids and features enhanced abundances of some elements by up to a factor of a thousand relative to the initial composition of the Solar System materials," he said.
"We interpret it as being from outside the Solar System. It constitutes the first recognised interstellar meteor." Avi said the new findings were fact and "not based on opinions", adding: "Of course if you are not part of this scientific process and are jealous of the attention you are getting you can raise a lot of criticism."
Asked how he dealt with the criticism he replied: "My skin has now turned into titanium.'' Meteor-like IM1 was detected by US Government sensors through the light it emitted as it burned up in Earth's atmosphere in 2014.
It withstood four times the pressure that would typically destroy an ordinary iron-metal meteor as it hurtled towards the planet at 100,215mph. Avi spent years working closely with the US military to pinpoint the exact spot where it crashed.
Technically known as CNEOS1 2014-01-08 the object had a diameter of 1.5ft, a mass of 1,014lb pounds and pre-impact velocity of 37.3 miles-per-second. His team recovered fragments of it last year off the coast of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea.
Since then they have been undergoing tests by independent scientists to try and determine their origin. Avi believes the spheres could be man's first proof aliens exist and more observatories should now be built to expand research into what passes near Earth.
"The best way to find out is to actually do the scientific work of building observatories that monitor and verify what these objects are," he said. "And if they are birds, or planes, or Chinese balloons, so be it. We can move on then. But we need to find out, it is our civic duty as scientists.
"The universe is so vast and instead of continuing to tell ourselves that there is nothing like us we should look for it. They don't care about us because we've only been on Earth for a few million years. They probably started the journey billions of years ago."
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