Extraterrestrial

New study casts Avi Loeb's 'alien spherules' claim into further doubt

By T.K. Randall
March 13, 2025 ·  9 comments

Did these objects even come from a meteorite at all ? Image Credit: Avi Loeb Back in June of 2023, Loeb - who had been on an expedition to search for pieces of a potentially artificially constructed interstellar object that fell somewhere in the Pacific Ocean - published a blog article describing the discovery of mysterious metal spherules with a composition he claimed to be "anomalous" when compared to human-made alloys.

"We found ten spherules," he said. "These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background."

"It has material strength that is tougher than all space rock that were seen before."

Since then, however, scientists have cast a great deal of doubt on whether the spherules are actually what Loeb is claiming they are, with University of Chicago physicist Patricio A Gallardo, for example, dismissing them as "coal fly ash", which he describes as being "a waste product of the combustion of coal in power plants and steam engines."

While Loeb later attempted to argue that his own analysis had ruled out this explanation, something else has now come up to cast doubt on the origin of the objects.

The entire basis for his expedition and recovery operation was the belief that an interstellar meteorite - known as CNEOS 20140108 - had burned up over the South Pacific Ocean in January, 2014.To determine exactly where the object might have come down, Loeb and his team used seismic data from a station on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea to narrow down the point of impact.

They then used this to guide their undersea search and recovery operations.

Now, however, an international team of researchers headed up by Johns Hopkins University in the US has determined that the seismic signals picked up by the station at the time were probably not from the falling meteorite but were instead most likely to have been a truck passing on a road nearby.

"The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer," said planetary seismologist and research leader Benjamin Fernando.

"It's really difficult to take a signal and confirm it is not from something. But what we can do is show that there are lots of signals like this, and show they have all the characteristics we'd expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we'd expect from a meteor."

If this is true, then Loeb wasn't even looking in the right place when he found the spherules.

This makes it more unlikely than ever that he has found pieces of an alien-made interstellar object.

Source: Cosmos Magazine | Comments (9)

Tags: Avi Loeb, Alien