Granted this is a click-bait headline, since it first showed up in the British online tabloid Metro, and the lead researcher here is a formerly well-respected Harvard Astrophysicist who has more recently been making the rounds of UFO conventions. but he and his colleagues at the Galileo Project have offered the most persuasive evidence yet that the fireball seen breaking up over the Pacific Ocean northeast of Papua-New Guinea on January 8, 2014, was not native to our solar system.
Using a magnetic trawling sled on the sea floor, the Galileo Project team managed to recover over 800 mostly iron spherules around the size of a sand grain in their June 2023 expedition to this remote section of the Pacific, and found something truly remarkable when their chemical and isotopic ratios were analyzed.
Though 90% of the collected spherules proved to be nothing out of the ordinary, the remaining 10% had vastly elevated proportions of Beryllium, Lanthanum, and Uranium compared to anything seen in terrestrial rocks, or meteorites from the Moon, Mars, or our Solar System’s Asteroid Belt. Likewise, the Iron isotope ratios of these anomalous BeLaU enriched spherules were unlike anything else ever seen before — and all of these uniquely peculiar spherules were collected from the area closest to the projected path of the bolide over the Pacific. This analysis, in addition to the estimated arrival velocity in excess of 45 km/s when object CNEOS 2014-01-08 (or IM1) exploded in our upper atmosphere all point to an origin from outside our solar system.
Not content with the groundbreaking discovery of the first material on our planet to be apparently sourced from beyond our Solar System, Dr. Loeb then takes things to the next level by suggesting that if they can recover more bits of this space visitor substantially larger than the millimeter-sized spherules already collected, which he hopes to do with a second expedition to the area later this year, then we should be able to determine if this was actually a piece of alien technology rather than just some random space rock from a different star system:
‘Imagine melting a semi-conductor or a computer screen, the droplets might not tell you much about what the original object was and you won’t even be able to confirm that it was technology,’ he said.
‘But if you get a piece of it, you can tell if it is artificial, or just a rock from another star
A couple of other tantalizing bits from wikipedia on the Galileo Project:
In a June 2023 post on his Medium profile; Loeb announced the discovery of an anomalous 8-millimeter-long curled piece of wire, designated "ISI-2". X-ray fluorescence analysis determined it was chiefly composed of Manganese and Platinum, commonly used in the manufacture of corrosion resistant laboratory electrodes. However, the relative composition of the elements in the wire was significantly different than that used in electrodes.[54]
Additionally, metallic shards were discovered that were determined to be composed of a S5 steel alloy, which bears a yield strength that far exceeds that of iron meteorites, reflecting previously published results that characterized IM1's strength.[55]