Remember Harvard professor Avi Loeb, who claimed that high-velocity meteorites recovered off the coast of Papua and New Guinea contained pieces of alien technology?
“Reanalysis of seismic data suggests Loeb may have been looking for meteorite debris in the wrong place,” the Washington Post wrote.
The analysis, led by Johns Hopkins University seismologist Benjamin Fernando, was cited by Loeb as helping to locate sound waves that were said to be from a meteor exploding in the atmosphere, as well as fields of meteor debris. They claim the sound waves most likely came from a truck that was driving on a nearby road. Seismograph.
“An interstellar signal linked to aliens was actually just a truck,” reads the headline of the Johns Hopkins University announcement. “The location of the fireball was actually very far from the location where the marine survey team went to recover meteorite fragments,” Fernando said in the statement. “Not only were they using the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place.”
Fernando's team used data from observatories in Australia and Palau designed to detect sound waves from nuclear tests to find more likely meteors more than 100 miles from the area they originally studied. Identified high places. They concluded that the material recovered from the ocean floor was particles produced from small ordinary meteorites, or other meteorites that hit the surface mixed with Earth's pollution.
“For several days before and after, there were hundreds of signals exactly like this on seismometers in Papua New Guinea,” Fernando told The Washington Post.
But the newspaper added: “Mr Loeb, however, stands firm on his position.”
“The seismic data has nothing to do with the location of the meteorite,” Loeb told The Washington Post. He said his team primarily based search coordinates on satellite data from the U.S. military. Three years of analysis by the U.S. Space Force confirmed the hypothesis that the meteor's ultra-high velocity indicates an extrasolar origin, Loeb said…
[Fernando] He said his team believes the meteor's alleged velocity is the result of a sensor measurement error. “We think most likely it is a natural meteorite from within our solar system,” he said.
In any case, the search for Mr. Loeb is far from over. Once he has enough money, he told the Post, he plans to return to the Pacific Ocean to look for larger pieces of what was thrown into the ocean.
