Sensational claim of possible alien debris hits a science speed bump

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/03/08/interstellar-meteor-seismic-truck/

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb scoured the Pacific seafloor last summer in search for debris from a meteor that had exploded in a fireball on Jan. 8, 2014. Loeb organized the two-week expedition because he thought the meteor might be something other than a random rock from space. Based on its astonishing speed, he suspected the object came from beyond our solar system — and might even be evidence of alien technology.

Loeb reported hitting pay dirt, retrieving hundreds of tiny blobs of molten material called “spherules” in the ocean off Papua New Guinea. Some of them, he later wrote, had such unfamiliar chemistry that they “may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin.”

Exploding meteor, or hospital delivery?

After an enigmatic object dubbed ’Oumuamua sped through the solar system in 2017, astronomers declared that it came from interstellar space. Loeb published an instantly controversial paper speculating that it might have an artificial origin — and could be a “light sail” engineered by an alien civilization. Many scientists saw this as a fringe interpretation of a phenomenon more plausibly natural in origin.

But Loeb kept going. He is the founder of the Galileo Project, the goal of which is to bring the search for extraterrestrial technology “from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research.”

Loeb has since contended that the chemical composition of some of the spherules found by that search is unlike anything known in our solar system, and “could have originated from a highly differentiated magma ocean of a planet with an iron core outside the solar system or from more exotic sources.”

But he has faced headwinds from many mainstream scientists, who generally adhere to the philosophy that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Aliens are a tough sell among scientists these days even if they are a hot topic in congressional hearings and popular culture. On Friday, the Department of Defense released a lengthy report declaring there is no evidence that aliens have visited Earth, dismissing the venerable conjecture that the government has secretly recovered alien hardware.