(NewsNation) — A new paper finds signals believed to be associated with the crash of an object from outside our solar system were actually related to a much more terrestrial cause: a truck.
In 2014, a meteorite fell to earth near Papua New Guinea, landing in the ocean. A few years later, Dr. Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard, used seismic data to pinpoint what he said was the site of the meteor and retrieved debris from the ocean floor that he claimed was a result of the crash.
Loeb used that debris and calculations of the meteor’s path to determine it may have come from outside our solar system, something the U.S. Space Force also supported.
However, a new paper being presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference finds a very different explanation.
Loeb, whose work has been criticized for being speculative, relied on seismic data to determine the meteor’s supposed crash site.
But new analysis by planetary scientist Dr. Benjamin Fernando found a very different explanation for the seismic signals: a truck driving down the road.
Fernando also says the meteor crashed in a different location than Loeb suggested, making the debris collected from the bottom of the ocean unrelated. The debris is likely from other meteors entirely unrelated to the 2014 fireball.
For his part, Loeb is not backing down, defending his conclusions by pointing to other data than the seismometer on the island and the levels of beryllium, lanthanum and uranium in the particles, which he says do not match the amounts that would be expected from an object native to our solar system.
As for the truck, Fernando confirmed it was a very Earth-bound, nonalien vehicle driving on the island of Papua New Guinea.