'Oumuamua

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Have Aliens Found Us? A Harvard Astronomer on the Mysterious Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua

The New Yorker
By Isaac Chotiner
January 16, 2019

On October 19, 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted a strange object travelling through our solar system, which they later described as “a red and extremely elongated asteroid.” It was the first interstellar object to be detected within our solar system; the scientists named it ‘Oumuamua, the Hawaiian word for a scout or messenger. The following October, Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, co-wrote a paper (with a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, Shmuel Bialy) that examined ‘Oumuamua’s “peculiar acceleration” and suggested that the object “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth’s vicinity by an alien civilization.” Loeb has long been interested in the search for extraterrestrial life, and he recently made further headlines by suggesting that we might communicate with the civilization that sent the probe. “If these beings are peaceful, we could learn a lot from them,” he told Der Spiegel.

I thought that title rang a bell - then I remembered seeing this recently ...

https://www.dailygrail.com/2019/01/the-o...conundrum/

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Professor Avi Loeb is planning to retrieve the meteor through a forthcoming expedition in the coming months in the Pacific Ocean (Papua New Guinea).

Harvard Professor Believes Alien Tech Could Have Crashed Into Pacific Ocean — And He Wants to Find It

By Ray Fuschetti, Malcolm Johnson and Aaron Strader • Published August 12, 2022 

There's a video with an interview with Avi Loeb embedded in the article.

A Harvard University professor believes a meteorite that crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2014 may be made of a material that one would expect to be in their favorite sci-fi movie. Avi Loeb — the longest serving chair of Harvard Universities Department of astronomy — is convinced that this object may be alien technology or a meteorite of unprecedented material strength. None of this is possible to confirm without physically studying the object, so the professor has planned an expedition to retrieve it that will cost over a million dollars in funding from private donors.

"This would be the first time that humans put their hands on the material that makes an object that came from another star."

(...)

There was one in particular that sparked the interest of Loeb and his student, Amir Siraj. Based on the speed of the meteor and how much of the object burned upon entry, Loeb determined that it must be made of a material that is tougher than iron.

"And so this one was an outlier in terms of its composition. It was also an outlier in terms of its speed outside the solar system. It moved at least twice as fast as stars move around the sun in the vicinity of the sun."

[Laird]

Professor Avi Loeb is planning to retrieve the meteor through a forthcoming expedition in the coming months in the Pacific Ocean (Papua New Guinea).

Harvard Professor Believes Alien Tech Could Have Crashed Into Pacific Ocean — And He Wants to Find It

Belatedly, an update on this (spoiler alert: the expedition was successful, and he found what he thinks are tiny fragments of the meteor):

Spherule analysis finds evidence of extrasolar composition

August 29, 2023 news release from The Galileo Project at Harvard University

Early analysis shows that some spherules from the meteor path contain extremely high abundances of Beryllium, Lanthanum and Uranium, labeled as a never-seen-before “BeLaU” composition. These spherules also exhibit iron isotope ratios unlike those found on Earth, the Moon and Mars, altogether implying an interstellar origin. The loss of volatile elements is consistent with IM1’s airburst in the Earth’s atmosphere.

[Laird]

Have Aliens Found Us? A Harvard Astronomer on the Mysterious Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua

He's now speculating on a new object, although he seems much less confident that it is of alien intelligence origins:

Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?

By Avi Loeb on Jul 17, 2025 on Medium.

Our paper explores the possibility that the recently discovered interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, may provide evidence in support of the dark forest hypothesis. This new interstellar interloper has displayed a number of anomalous characteristics, some of which were summarized in an essay that I wrote shortly after its discovery.

If the hypothesis about a technological artifact ends up being correct, then there are two possible implications: first that the intentions of 3I/ATLAS are entirely benign, and second that they are malign. In the first case, humanity need not do anything but await the arrival of this interstellar messenger with open arms. It is the second option which is of great concern.

Our paper is largely a pedagogical exercise, with interesting realizations worthy of a record in the scientific literature. By far, the most likely outcome will be that 3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet, and we await the astronomical data to support this likely origin.