Harvard astronomy professor Avi Loeb believes he has new evidence of the existence of alien spacecraft.
Last June, he recovered small magnetic spheres from the Pacific Ocean, and claimed that the small, round objects were from a watermelon-sized object that collided with Earth in 2014 – in other words, a piece of technology made by aliens.
“It raises the possibility that it may have been a traveler-like meteorite, artificially created by another civilization,” Loeb said on GBH's programme. Boston Public Radio Monday.
He first put out a preliminary version of his findings last summer. Since then, several researchers not associated with the mission have disputed his analysis. October 1, 2023 paper Consider that the pellets are made from human-produced coal ash.
He said that Loeb presented new results last week that he claims debunk this theory.
“What we did was compare the 55 elements from the periodic table in the coal ash to those special pellets we found,” he said. “And obviously it's very different.”
He said that his work follows the scientific method: collecting materials, analyzing them, and following up on the evidence.
“It's not based on opinions,” Loeb said. “And of course, if you are not part of this scientific process and are jealous of the attention you are getting, you can raise a lot of criticism.”
When asked how he deals with such criticism, he said: “My skin has now turned into titanium.”
Loeb rose to prominence when he controversially claimed that 'Oumuamua, a hundreds-meter-long cigar-shaped interstellar object that passed through our solar system in 2017, was an object created by intelligent aliens.
Others hypothesized that although the object's behavior was unusual, it was simply a comet — and published research to that effect Last March.
Since signing this claim, Loeb has continued his founding Galileo Project At Harvard. It uses an observatory at the university to constantly comb the skies in search of extraterrestrial life, analyzing the results using machine learning, he said.
He believes that more observatories should be built to expand research into what passes near Earth, as astronomers often focus on distant objects.
“The best way to find out is to actually do the scientific work of building observatories that monitor and verify what these objects are,” Loeb said. “And if they are birds, or planes, or Chinese balloons, so be it. We can move on then. But we need to find out, it is our civic duty as scientists.
He added: “The universe is so vast, and instead of continuing to tell ourselves that there is nothing like us, we should look for it.”
In two weeks, he will make a trip to Poland to give a speech on the 550th anniversary of the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus, who proved that the Earth revolves around the sun.
He wants to promote a more abstract idea in the same paradigm: that humans are not “the center of the intellectual universe.”
He added: “They don't care about us. Because we've only been on Earth for a few million years, and the human race. They probably started the journey billions of years ago.”
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