Harvard’s Avi Loeb says 50 microscopic spherules recovered from Pacific could be from ‘alien probe’

Molten iron raindrops fell from the first known meteor ever to crash into Earth from outside our solar system.

And now 50 of those Pacific-cooled little iron ‘spheres’ have been recovered via magnetic dredging off the coast of Papua New Guinea.

The IM1 meteor — which erupted into a fireball in the sky before impact on Jan. 8, 2014 — has been an object of fascination for Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb since 2019, when he and graduate student Amir Siraj first determined its interstellar origin.

Loeb has sparked controversy, as well as millions in independent funding, over his search for materials in space that could be evidence or artifacts of alien civilizations exploring our solar system.

He has not dismissed the idea that IM1’s mysterious iron debris could be the first hard evidence that a “spacecraft” from an “alien technological civilization” crash-landed on our planet.

“We want to answer the question,” Loeb said this week, “are we alone?”

“Given IM1’s high speed and abnormal material strength,” Loeb said Fox News digital“the source must have been a natural environment other than the solar system, or an alien technological civilization.”

IM1, Loeb noted, “is actually harder and has a material strength higher than any of the space rocks carved by NASA.”

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb raised $1.5 million for his expedition to find samples of the probable interstellar meteor IM1 off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Above, Loeb shows off a 10-gram iron fragment from their magnetic dredging of the IM1 crash site on June 23, 2023

“That makes it quite unusual.”

But whether the object turns out to be intelligently crafted or naturally made, Loeb said his group’s physical recovery of material from beyond our solar system is already “historic” and “successful.”

Last year, scientists and secret technology from US Space Command confirmed Loeb and Siraj’s calculations on IM1’s interstellar trajectory, reporting in an official letter to NASA that they were 99.999 percent sure the object was beyond the range of our sun.

Loeb’s critics in the world of astronomy and astrophysics had expressed skepticism about this idea, as well as the professor’s theory that IM1 might be made of iron metal, but again they have been proven wrong.

Thanks to onboard analysis via X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, Loeb and his team have now discovered that iron is the “dominant component” of the chemical composition of the IM1 spheres.

The findings are a strong rebuke to astrophysicists at Canada’s Institute for Earth and Space Exploration, who claimed that their computer modeling of IM1’s behavior before impact “argues strongly against an iron object.’

The sea portion of Loeb’s expedition comes to an end this week, leaving the team tasked with further analyzing the collected iron spheres and other recovered fragments to determine if their atomic elements and isotopes reveal more about the place or origin of IM1 or its alien makers .

“This has never been done before,” Loeb said. “We’ve never received a package from a cosmic neighbor.”

“This could be the first time humans get their hands on interstellar material,” he said.