Avi Loeb is at it again

Mark Honeychurch - 4 September 2023

Abi Loeb, who went against the tide of the scientific community back when the asteroid Oumuamua passed earth, and claimed it was an alien artefact, has struck again. This time, YouTube alerted me (presumably because I’ve been watching the UAP nonsense unfold on credulous American news channel News Nation) to the existence of a News Nation interview with Avi about his recent discovery of small spherules of alien origin dredged up from the seabed.

So, a while ago Avi managed to secure funding for an expedition to try to recover the remains of a meteor that the Defense Department had recorded as having reached earth at a high enough speed (45 km/s) to suggest an interstellar origin. The reality is apparently that the DoD’s monitoring equipment tends to over-estimate the speed of faster objects, and that it is likely to have mis-calulated the speed of this particular object enough to suggest an interstellar origin when in reality a local origin within our solar system is more likely.

Avi’s funding for this project came from Charles Hoskinson, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur, who donated $1.5 million so that the project could dredge the bottom of the ocean where the meteor’s fragments would have come down to earth. A large magnetic sled was pulled over the seabed which attracted any ferrous metal fragments.

These fragments included some anomalous small spherules (1mm or less in diameter) that apparently were not found in a control area that was dredged outside of the meteor’s path. However, the speed the meteor was supposedly travelling at means that the expectation is that the entire meteor would have fully vaporised in the lower, thicker part of earth’s atmosphere, meaning that no spherules of material would have been produced.

Avi is claiming that the lab results of the chemical composition of these tiny metal spheres shows that they’re from outside our solar system, and he’s additionally claiming that they’re likely to come from some kind of alien technology. This seems to be a pretty huge leap of logic. Although apparently the lab results do show some anomalies that suggest these particles are not just run of the mill, it still appears to be much more likely that they have a terrestrial, or possibly elsewhere in the solar system, origin.

Given Avi’s history with Oumuamua, there’s good reason to doubt his academic conclusions and his media claims this time round. The paper that Avi is talking about to the media is in preprint, and hasn’t yet been peer reviewed. And his grandiose media claims about aliens seem therefore at the very least to be premature. Thank goodness scientists have been willing to speak up about this one, like Pennsylvania State University’s Jason Wright:

“Loeb’s work is unambiguously counterproductive, alienating the community working on these problems and misinforming the public”