Extraterrestrial

Avi Loeb rules out terrestrial origin of tektites in 'alien' spherules

By T.K. Randall
September 21, 2025

Image: Avi Loeb
Credit: Christopher Michel / CC BY-SA 4.0 (adapted) Back in June of 2023, Harvard astronomer Prof Avi 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.

At the time, his claims were universally panned by scientists who ultimately concluded that what he had found was likely to be little more than - as University of Chicago physicist Patricio A Gallardo described it - "coal fly ash, a waste product of the combustion of coal in power plants and steam engines."

Now, though, additional research has served to counteract one of the most frequently cited skeptical arguments concerning his claim that the spherules are from an interstellar object.

The work focused on tektites - glass-like rocks formed during a large meteor impact.Up until now, it was argued that tektites found within the spherules were actually from pre-existing, common materials strewn across the ocean floor.

Following the new research, however, Loeb and his team determined that the existing tektites in the region were very different from the ones found in the spherules.

"It is relatively easy to come up with speculative hypotheses regarding the origin of the BeLaU spherules," Loeb wrote.

"But our detailed analysis argues that speculations associating BeLaU-spherules with common terrestrial materials are unsubstantiated."

So while this research certainly doesn't confirm that the spherules are from an interstellar object (or that such an object was artificially constructed), it does help to keep such a possibility in contention.

Source: Avi Loeb Medium

Tags: Avi Loeb, Alien