Another alien? Harvard professor says he found fragments of mysterious meteor at the bottom of the Pacific

Harvard University professor Avi Loeb, who recently completed a $1.5m expedition in search of signs of a mysterious meteor dubbed IM1 that crashed in 2014 from the coast of Papua New Guinea, believes that he has found evidence of their existence at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Speaking to The Independent, the 61-year-old astrophysicist said that a team of deep-sea explorers discovered 50 tiny spherules or molten droplets. “I oversaw them using a magnetic sled to find out the tiny spherules. The sled was dropped from the expedition vessel.”

He said that the tiny objects are about half a millimeter in size. “It is expected that those objects are made from a steel-titanium alloy which is much stronger than the iron found in regular meteors.”

The tiny objects require further testing, however, Professor Leob believes that they either have interstellar origin or are made by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, The Independent reported. 

Previously, Prof Loeb chaired Harvard’s astronomy department from 2011 to 2020 but now he leads the university’s Galileo Project. The project is working on the establishment of open-sourced observatories to search for signs of UFOs and interstellar objects.

In 2019, Prof Leob's quest to search for signs of meteors began when IM1 caught the attention of his research team. At that time, the team combed NASA’s open-source catalog of meteors for irregular space rock detected around the Earth.

They stated that IM1 stands out for its high velocity as it traveled 95% faster than nearby stars. In addition, IM1 also exploded quite lower in the Earth's atmosphere than regular meteors, as per The Independent reports. 

Prof Leob said that the object was tougher than all other space rocks in the same NASA catalog. In short, it was an outlier of material strength, he added. 

He and his colleague Amir Siraj are more than 99% sure that IM1 had traveled to Earth from another star.