Seismic waves from 2014 'alien' meteor was just a truck nearby, researchers say
Correlation isn't causation. Turns out a truck created the seismic signal. Even worse, deep-sea divers went to the wrong place to find the evidence.
A meteor during the peak of the 2009 Leonid Meteor Shower. The photograph shows the meteor, afterglow, and wake as distinct components. (Wikimedia Commons/Navicore)
Sound waves thought to be generated by "alien technology" when a fireball entered Earth's atmosphere in 2014 in fact came from a regular, terrestrial truck, scientists say.
In January 2014, a meteor entered Earth's atmosphere over the Western Pacific, and ground vibrations apparently coinciding with the fireball were recorded at a seismic station on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. In 2023, a privately funded international expedition searched the ocean floor where the meteor was believed to have fallen, and materials recovered were described as possibly reflecting "an extraterrestrial technological origin."
But new research led by Johns Hopkins University scientists has raised doubts about the materials' supposed alien origins, after the sound vibrations picked up by the seismic station were found to have likely been caused by a truck on a nearby road.
“The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins who led the research, said in a statement. “It’s really difficult to take a signal and confirm it is not from something. But what we can do is show that there are lots of signals like this, and show they have all the characteristics we’d expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we'd expect from a meteor.”
According to Fernando, without evidence of seismic waves, the meteor likely entered the atmosphere somewhere else.
“The fireball location was actually very far away from where the oceanographic expedition went to retrieve these meteor fragments,” he said. “Not only did they use the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place.”
The research team is set to present its findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, on March 12.
After analyzing data from stations in Australia and Palau designed to detect sound waves from nuclear testing, researchers determined a more likely location for the meteor's landing more than 100 miles from the original search site.
Researchers say the materials recovered from the ocean in the earlier expedition were likely ordinary meteorites, or particles produced from other meteorites mixed with terrestrial contamination.
“Whatever was found on the sea floor is totally unrelated to this meteor, regardless of whether it was a natural space rock or a piece of alien spacecraft — even though we strongly suspect that it wasn’t aliens,” Fernando said.
Reporting by TMX
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