A prestigious Harvard physicist goes to an island to search for the remains of what he believes to be an alien probe.

An ambitious expedition to Papua New Guinea to search for the remains of a meteorite he believes may be an alien probe is led by Ari Loeb, a prestigious Harvard physicist.

Loeb is organizing the mission to the Pacific island nation to find fragments of CNEOS1 2014-01-08, which crashed on Earth in 2014 after a journey outside our solar system. The cost of the search operation is 1.5 million dollars.

On the Medium site, Loeb wrote an article detailing this challenge: “In a couple of months, I will be leading an expedition to collect the fragments of the first interstellar meteor. This meteor is the first near-Earth object detected by humans outside the solar system.”

The scientist doubts whether it is really a meteorite, as he believes it is made of extremely hard material and may not be a meteorite at all.

Loeb is thrilled to find alien probesand described the expedition as justified but not without risk, according to the Daily Beast.

“There’s a chance it could fail,” he said, adding that his team could end up recovering fragments, but they could turn out to be of natural rather than man-made origin.

With help from the U.S. military, Loeb and his team narrowed the meteorite’s probable impact zone to an area less than half a square mile in the ocean off Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. New York Post.

The challenge is to find small fragments that could turn out to be “technological”, i.e. manufactured, thus providing a solid proof of the existence of extraterrestrials.

Otherwise, the remains could be found to consist of some kind of never-before-seen super-strong material, such as metal forged from a neutron star, the collapsed core of a supergiant star.

Loeb heads Project Galileo, which seeks evidence of extraterrestrial technological artifacts, says the soccer field-sized object called oumuamua (Hawaiian for “scout”) that skimmed our planet in 2017 could also have been an alien probe.

Loeb detailed in Medium what happened on January 8, 2014: “An object from interstellar space, now called IM1, collided with the Earth at a speed of 45 kilometers per second. As a result of its friction with the air , the object disintegrated into small fragments about 100 kilometers off the coast of Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.”

He continued: “The fragmentation increased the collective surface area and therefore the friction, accelerating the release of heat and generating an escaping fireball. The explosion released a small percentage of the energy associated with the Hiroshima atomic bomb in a fifth of a second.”

“The bright flare was detected by US government cameras. The location was listed in the JPL/NASA CNEOS fireball catalog with one significant figure after the decimal point in longitude and latitude,” the physicist explained.

And he gets excited: “We have a boat. We have a dream team, which includes some of the most experienced and skilled professionals in ocean shipping,” Loeb wrote on Medium in late January.

“We have comprehensive design and manufacturing plans for the necessary sled, magnets, collection nets, and mass spectrometer. And most importantly, we received the green light today to move forward,” she added, referring to the endorsement by Papua New Guinea.

Loeb managed to get the Pentagon to release full data from the 2014 fireball, called CNEOS1 2014-01-08, which he says may be the hardest meteorite on record.

“Analyzing the composition of the fragments could allow us to determine whether the object is of natural or man-made origin,” he wrote.

He states that it is possible that the remains “are resistant because they are of artificial origin, they resemble our own interstellar probes but they were launched billions of years ago by a distant technological civilization”.

Loeb has promised that if he recovers a sizable technological relic from the Pacific Ocean, he will take it to the Museum of Modern Art for display in New York.