Professor Avi Loeb’s research suggests tiny fragments of meteorite came from outside the solar system (Pictures: Getty/A Loeb
In January 2014, a meteor scorched its way through the atmosphere, a brilliant ball of fire over the Pacific Ocean.
Before it plunged into the sea, strange sound waves were picked up by a seismometer in nearby Papua New Guinea.
Could it have been an alien signal? Perhaps a desperate SOS?
Sadly for UFO fans, it was not. The sound waves were actually from a truck, distinctly Earthly in origin, trundling along a nearby road.
‘The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,’ said Dr Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins University 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.’
The seismometer that picked up the original signals lies close to a road (Picture: RM Candanosa/B Fernando/JHU/CNES/Airbus via Google)
The team that made the disappointing discovery also says it also raises doubts that material collected from the suspected crash site last year are alien materials from the meteor.
The tiny spherules, described as ‘magnetic marbles’, have been studied intensively by Harvard professor Dr Avi Loeb. Last year he published findings suggesting they proved the meteorite, known as IM1, came from beyond our solar system – and could even be the remnants of alien technology.
Dr Loeb argued that an unusual abundance of three elements, beryllium (Be), lanthanum (La), and uranium (U), named BeLaU, suggests they are unlike any meteorites seen before.
Professor Loeb with tiny fragments believed to be from IM1 (Picture: A Loeb)
However, the Johns Hopkins team argues the new seismic data means the meteor may not have even fallen near where the spherules were collected.
‘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.’
To help locate a new entry point, Dr Fernando and the team used data from stations in Australia and Palau, an island in the Pacific, designed to detect sound waves from nuclear testing.
The spherules were less than a millimetre in size (Picture: Avi Loeb)
Their results, which will be presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston on March 12, suggest the meteorite actually landed more than 100 miles from the area investigated.
However, writing on his Medium blog, Professor Loeb argued that the meteorite had been located using more than the seismograph, including data from the Department of Defense (DoD).
‘The authors ignore the DoD localisation data and claim that based on seismometer data alone, IM1’s localisation is unknown within a much larger region,’ he wrote.
‘There is nothing one could say to people who choose to dismiss reliable DoD information.’
He added: ‘Science is exciting as long as one is willing to follow the facts, especially if the facts are provided by the US Space Command in DoD, which is funded at an annual budget of $30 billion to protect the US from ballistic missiles launched by adversarial countries.’
But alongside questioning the location of IM1, the Johns Hopkins team concluded the materials that have been studied so far are simply ordinary meteorites – or meteorite particles that have mixed with terrestrial materials.
‘Whatever was found on the seafloor 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,’ Dr Fernando added.
Spoilsport.