There’s little question an especially shiny fireball careened by means of the environment north of Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014. It’s additionally true that divers recovered supplies on the backside of the ocean final 12 months close to the place many specialists believed the item landed—and that outstanding Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb theorized a few of these metallic spherules had been presumably of “extraterrestrial technological” origin. But as to the bottom vibrations recorded at a seismic station on Manus Island throughout the identical atmospheric occasion? The clarification is likely way more mundane.
“[T]hey have all the characteristics we’d expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we’d expect from a meteor,” Johns Hopkins planetary seismologist Benjamin Fernando stated on Thursday.
Fernando and his colleagues will current their findings on March 12 throughout the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.
Although Fernando’s workforce concedes it’s troublesome to show what one thing isn’t by means of signal knowledge, it’s fairly straightforward to focus on the traits it could share with present, explainable seismic information.
“The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” stated Fernando.
[Related: How scientists decide if they’ve actually found signals of alien life.]
To additional bolster the way more on a regular basis clarification, researchers additionally utilized knowledge collected throughout the 2014 occasion by services in Australia and Palau initially constructed to measure nuclear check sound waves. After factoring in these recordings, Fernando’s workforce revised the earlier location estimations for a extra precise spot of the atmospheric prevalence—an space 100 miles away from the unique area.
“The fireball location was actually very far away from where the oceanographic expedition went to retrieve these meteor fragments,” Fernando stated of the 2023 restoration journey. “Not only did they use the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place.”
The workforce additionally doesn’t mince phrases of their new paper, “Probably Not Aliens: Seismic Data Analysis from the 2014 ‘Interstellar Meteor.’” Of the alien idea, the researchers “consider it to be at best highly overstated and at worst entirely erroneous.” And of the fabric recovered final 12 months, “poor localisation implies that any material recovered is far less likely to be from the meteor, let alone of interstellar or even extraterrestrial origin.”
[Related: How lightning on exoplanets could make it harder to find alien life.]
Given NASA’s estimate that round 50 tons of meteoritic materials bombards Earth every single day, Fernando’s workforce says it’s undoubtedly doable a few of these fragments retrieved from the ocean ground could certainly be from another meteorite. Regardless, they “strongly suspect that it wasn’t aliens.”
Disappointing? Perhaps. But there’ll most likely be loads of new UAP sightings to parse sooner or later—particularly if individuals take up the federal government’s provide to submit their very own inexplicable occasions.
For extra detailed debunking, tune into a livestream of subsequent week’s findings right here.