Astronomers Are In Search Of Fallen Alien Tech In The Pacific Ocean

The ocean can be a daunting place with plenty of secrets that humans cannot even begin to comprehend. However, one brave professor from Harvard is willing to dive deep into a galactic quandary that seems to have sunken to the bottom of the Pacific.

Avi Loeb, one of the longest-serving chair members of Harvard’s astronomy department, believes that a comet containing alien technology has breached through our stratosphere and crashed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. 

He detailed the collision in a paper published on arXiv in 2019. According to the study, the meteor landed in Earth’s waters in 2014. 

According to NBC, Loeb and his research team scoured through a host of different government documents that caught different meteors on their sensors and found that this one, in particular, was the fastest moving one to be detected. It burned so much upon the impact that Loeb was convinced that whatever it was made up of had to be from an alien civilization. 

He was even more driven to find the bolide after a letter from the US Space Command in the Department of Defense had stated at a “99.999% confidence level” that the fireball was in fact from beyond this solar system. 

Space.com reported on the meteor and theorized that it struck the ocean some 200 miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea. At 1.5 feet long, it hit Earth with an impact of 1% of the Hiroshima blast, for reference, and hence would have definitely disintegrated into pieces at least the size of coins. 

As of now, Loeb and his team have raised half a million dollars but are still in need of the final million to get them a boat so that they can head to the crash site in Papua New Guinea and start raking the sea floor for cosmic fragments.

[via The Byte and NBC, cover image via Austin Human / Unsplash (CC0)]