The world's top alien hunters explain why a Harvard physicist's discovery of 'alien' tech is likely a false alarm

• Harvard physicist Avi Loeb announced the discovery of tiny "spherules" at the bottom of the Pacific.
• He said these spherules may be from an alien technology outside of our solar system.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb announced that he and his team discovered fragments of material at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean that may potentially be linked to aliens.

The fragments "could be a spacecraft from another civilization, or some technological gadget," Loeb told CBS News.

But experts who have been searching for alien life for many years told Insider they aren't sold on the idea that Loeb's findings represent evidence of alien intelligence.

"I like wild and crazy ideas — they make us all think — occasionally one of them might be right. But I'm extremely skeptical about this one," said Dan Werthimer, chief technologist of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

'A lot of unknowns' in the data

Loeb's team found 50 sub-millimeter-sized "spherules" that he said he thinks came from an interstellar meteoroid, which he named IM1, that crashed into waters near Papua New Guinea in 2014.

Both the speed of the meteor and the composition of the spherules is why Loeb thinks they may be of possible alien origin. But experts aren't convinced.

"As I look at the data, there are just a lot of unknowns," said Douglas Vakoch, president of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), an organization that searches for signs of extraterrestrial life by transmitting intentional signals to nearby stars.

The meteroid's speed was calculated from incomplete data, experts said

Loeb proposed that the meteor IM1 was of interstellar origin in a paper he published in 2019. To estimate its speed, he and a student used data from the Center for Near Earth Object Studies, which tracks the speed and trajectory of objects in space that travel close to, and occasionally hit, Earth.

Loeb wrote in a first-hand account on Medium:

"[The data] showed that IM1 was moving outside the solar system faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the Sun. The possibility that IM1's excess speed benefited from propulsion and the fact that it was tougher than all known space rocks, raise the possibility that it may have been technological in origin."

Bu Werthimer pointed out that the radar used to detect the meteor is known to make mistakes on the speed of meteors that come in at a shallow angle — like this one did — compared to other instruments.

That said, US Space Command followed up on Loeb's calculations and, in 2022, issued a formal letter to NASA confirming IM1's interstellar origin with 99.999% confidence.

"The velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory," the letter stated.

But it doesn't matter what any government official tells you — the DOD statement has no standing in the scientific community, Vakoch said, echoing the concerns of some astrophysicists.

The composition of the spherules could mean something totally different

Let's forget about the meteor for a second. What about those peculiar spherule fragments?

Loeb wrote in Medium that "based on the measured abundance of U238, Pb206, U235 and Pb207," in two of the collected spherules, their age was closer to the age of the universe than the age of our solar system.

"In the coming weeks we will examine further any clue for the spherules being different from solar system materials. This will constitute independent evidence for the interstellar origin of IM1 in addition to its measured speed," Loeb wrote.

Some experts are still skeptical. Monica Grady, professor of planetary and space sciences at The Open University, wrote in The Conversation that spherules from space have been found at the bottom of the ocean as far back as 1872 by the HMS Challenger.

Nowadays, it can be difficult to tell the difference between spherules and products of industrial pollution.

Vakoch agreed, saying that, "I don't see anything in the reports of these metallic spheroids that suggests anything close to them being an alien technology, or even necessarily something from outside our solar system."

Loeb said that early reports of the spherules' chemical composition were from a small sample and not representative of the full collection. Moreover, "the X-ray Fluorescence analyzer used on the ship was blind to some elements," he told Insider over email.

Now that he's back on land, he said the team has shared the materials with three leading labs that "include world experts with state-of-the-art diagnostic instruments, such as X-ray fluorescence analyzers, mass spectrometers, and scanning electron microscopes," to analyze the spherules' composition in more detail.

Loeb told Insider that, when ready, the team will publish their findings in a scientific paper that will be "shared openly and submitted for a peer-reviewed journal."

In the meantime, experts will likely remain skeptical until more concrete proof presents itself.

"I'm very optimistic about life in the universe — I think it's likely to be teeming with life — but this is not evidence for it," Werthimier said.