Surprise: An ‘alien’ gadget was slightly more famous

In January 2014, a meteor from space fell off the coast of Papua New Guinea. That might have been the end of it, but several years later Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard, drew on seismic data from near the site, searched for crash debris on the ocean floor and proposed that the remains “could reflect an extraterrestrial technological development . origin.”

Dr. Loeb has previously been accused by his colleagues of wild speculation and sensationalism. Last fall, Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins University, led a team that reexamined the nearby seismic signals and concluded that they were not evidence of alien activity, or anything remotely related to it.

On Tuesday Dr. Fernando presenting the data in detail at a scientific conference. He recently spoke to The New York Times to give a sneak peek at what his team had discovered. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How did this all start?

In 2014, a meteor entered the atmosphere and exploded. Sometimes you hear these meteors on seismometers. Avi Loeb wrote an article saying that he had found the seismic signal from this meteor and used it to pinpoint exactly where the meteor debris fell. And from there they set up an expedition and picked up stuff from the seabed.

In one article, Dr. Loeb and a co-author said they confirmed “the location of the fireball” in the ocean based on “the timing of the strong seismic signal.” But you determined that the seismic information did not come from a meteor. Where do you think it came from?

A truck.

Like in a super fast alien truck?

No, it was a normal truck, like a normal truck driving past a seismometer. Because the Loeb team are not seismologists, they may have misunderstood the data. In reality, all they found was a truck.

And where did that truck go? In the Milky Way?

No no no. The truck was on the same island in Papua New Guinea. It’s a regular Earth truck. I think that’s technically in the Milky Way!

How did you come to the conclusion that we are not being attacked by aliens?

We looked at two weeks of data around the time of this event. We saw hundreds of similar signals like the one Loeb studied. If there are hundreds, they can’t all be meteors. Of those hundreds of signals, most occur during the day. The things that Loeb saw, that we saw, all happen much more often during the day. That points to anthropogenic noise.

Man-made sound?

Yes.

Then we looked at the exact signal he was looking at, and it was coming from a main road. Over time it moved from a main road towards a hospital, and then back to the main road. So, from analysis of the data, it seems much more likely that the signal came from a truck turning off the main road, passing the seismometer at the hospital and then driving in the opposite direction.

Not a single meteor was involved.

In the conclusion of your article you write that you have “a very high degree of confidence that the alleged meteor fragments found on the seabed are unrelated to the fireball” – and therefore that the stuff is from the ocean floor picked It was probably just material from the Earth, or perhaps part of the thousands of tons of meteorites that reach Earth every year. So we shouldn’t worry about aliens invading our hospitals?

You would be reasonably justified not worrying about aliens invading hospitals.

What’s the bigger lesson from all of this?

There are two: First, if you want to perform seismic analysis, it is ideal if you first contact a seismologist. The other is: they are not aliens.