- Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb believes that he may have found alien technology.
- His team found 10 tiny spheres from a meteor that landed off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014.
A Harvard astrophysicist believes he may have discovered pieces of alien technology from a meteor that landed off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014.
During a search for the meteor, known as IM1, Avi Loeb said his team found 10 tiny spheres mainly made out of iron.
"When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background," Loeb told CBS News Boston. "They have colors of gold, blue, brown, and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth."
"The fact that it was made of materials tougher than even iron meteorites, and moving faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun, suggested potentially it could be a spacecraft from another civilization, or some technological gadget,"
Loeb's team worked with the government to establish a 10-kilometer range within which the meteor could have landed. They then traveled to and searched that area on a boat called the Silver Star.
They used magnets to comb the seabed and found the 10 spherules he believed could be alien tech. The US Space Command said it was "99.999%" certain that the fragments came from another solar system, per CBS.
Loeb compared the situation to the NASA Voyager spacecraft.
"They will exit the solar system in 10,000 years — just imagine them colliding with another planet far away a billion years from now," he said. "They would appear as a meteor."
"It will take us tens of thousands of years to exit our solar system with our current spacecraft to another star," the astrophysicist added. "This material spent that time arriving to us, but it's already here."
Loeb, known as the "alien hunter of Harvard," according to The Independent, is a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and leads the Galileo Project, which searches for physical examples of aliens and their tech.
He's repeatedly said that 'Oumuamua — the first interstellar object found passing through our solar system — could be another example of alien tech, as detailed in his book "Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth."