Abraham “Avi” Loeb, dubbed the alien hunter of Harvard, is an honored Israeli-American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology and is a professor at Harvard. In 2018, he suggested that alien space craft may be in the Solar System and used the interstellar object Oumuamua as an example, and in July 2021, Avi founded The Galileo Project for the Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts.
In January 2014, a 500-kilogram fireball was observed by the DOD where it was recorded as traveling faster than most meteors and ended up breaking up over the South Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea. Avi’s team set out on a research boat called the Silver Star in late June 2023 looking for possible debris , & used a magnetic sled to excavate this debris from the ocean floor where the meteor hit. They found 50 tiny metallic balls called spherules that were made mostly of iron, and each is a fraction of a millimeter in size. He concluded that these metal pieces did not originate from Earth, and did not match any samples of the element found on Earth, leading him to speculate that this piece might be from outer space.
On the second half we discussed some of our favorite action disaster movies involving either a meteor or aliens crashing on earth, including Deep Impact, Armageddon, Battleship and Slither.
Join us on episode 164 to hear more about Avi Loeb and his discovery of interstellar alien spherules in the South Pacific Ocean!