Avi Loeb has a boat and a team to scour the seabed for what he claims is an alien probe
A Harvard physicist has launched a $1.5 million mission to prove a meteorite that exploded over the Pacific Ocean in 2014 was an alien probe.
Avi Loeb worked closely with the US military for years to establish the impact zone near Papua New Guinea and is now ready to embark on an expedition to uncover the fragments left behind.
Loeb said a boat and a “dream team” have been secured for the venture, along with “full design and fabrication plans for the required sled, magnets, collection nets and mass spectrometer,” he shared in a statement. Medium mail.
Talking to the Daily beastLoeb said he plans to scour the ocean floor for two weeks using sand-screening machines, some with magnets, which he says should catch bits of alien technology.
The US Space Command confirmed in April 2022 that the 15-foot-wide meteorite came from another solar system, making it Earth’s first known interstellar visitor.
And this, according to Loeb, provides more evidence to support his theory.
Loeb has made a name for himself by openly believing that aliens have made contact with Earth.
In 2021, the physicist released a book titled “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” which argued that Oumuamu is not a comet or asteroid, but a light sail – a method of spacecraft propulsion.
Oumuamua was discovered in October 2017 by a telescope in Hawaii, millions of miles away.
Loeb has been planning the trip to Papua New Guinea since he first learned about the asteroid in 2019.
Four years earlier, the interstellar meteor was spotted just north of Manus Island, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, on January 8, 2014.
According to NASA, the meteor lit up the sky near Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, on Jan. 8, 2014, as it traveled at more than 160,000 miles per hour
In 2021, the physicist released a book titled “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” arguing that Oumuamu (artist’s illustration) is not a comet or asteroid, but a light sail – a method of spacecraft propulsion.
It exploded in midair, causing “a detonation of only one percent of the Hiroshima bomb.”
“We found that the blast wave from the meteor explosion generated a high-quality signal in a seismometer on Manus Island, which is part of Papua New Guinea,” Loeb wrote on Medium.
He told The Harvard Crimson that he and his team will search an inch of the ocean floor for tiny meteor fragments.
“This meteor probably broke up into small fragments, so we’re not looking for one big piece,” he said. “We only need a few grams of material – that’s all, a few grams – to say the composition.”
“We’re trying to pinpoint the impact location — pinpoint as much as possible,” he added.
Loeb is not blind to the idea that many people disagree with his hypothesis that the meteor is alien technology.
“People say, ‘Oh, it’s just a space rock. We’ve seen so many space rocks in the past. What’s new about it?'” he said.
“It’s the first to come from outside the solar system, and second, it’s harder than 99.7 percent of anything we’ve seen.”
Loeb hopes his mission will bear fruit, but added: “There is a chance it will fail.”
Even “success” can be a letdown if the team recovers fragments, but those fragments turn out to be natural rather than artificial.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he said.
