Harvard ‘alien hunter’ triggers interest with startling UFO assertions before House hearing

Avi Loeb, a Harvard physicist, believes that he found fragments of alien technology on the ocean floor off the coast of Papua New Guinea.  

Loeb, who calls himself the alien hunter of Harvard, went to the region searching for bits of a rare meteor, one that formed outside our solar system and reportedly crashed in the area in 2014.   

Last week he revealed his findings, which included 50 small metallic spheres he found in the sand on the ocean floor.   

Loeb contends the pieces were fragments of an alien craft — the first hard evidence proving that there was life beyond Earth — and bolstered his claim by citing a U.S. Space Command notice that said the trajectory of whatever crashed into the ocean was interstellar in origin.   

U.S. Space Command, however, never said anything about an alien craft crashing into the water, and there is no evidence to tie the metallic spheres Loeb has shown images of to the meteor. There’s also no material evidence that the spheres are otherworldly, and Loeb’s claims have been met with skepticism in the scientific community. 

Loeb’s claims are one of several that have received attention from the media and even in Congress in recent months amid a run of UFO news stories.  

The stories have accelerated Congress’s own interest in the issue, and the House Oversight and Accountability Committee will hold a hearing next week on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). The hearing, led by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), will investigate the increase in sightings of UAPs and their impact on national security.    

The committee will hear testimony from Air Force veteran David Grusch, a former member of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and whistleblower who has made claims about the government withholding information related to UFOs, as well as former Navy Cmdr. David Fravor, who shot the leaked “tic tac” video showing an unidentified flying object off the coast of San Diego before it suddenly disappeared into the water.  

Grusch told NewsNation that the U.S. government has recovered nonhuman craft for decades, as well as nonhuman species inside.  

“Well, naturally, when you recover something that’s either landed or crashed, sometimes you encounter dead pilots and believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it’s true,” he said in the NewsNation interview. 

“We’re definitely not alone,” he added. “The data points, quite empirically, that we’re not alone.”

NewsNation and The Hill are both owned by Nexstar.  

NewsNation confirmed Grusch’s credentials but did not view or verify evidence that the whistleblower said he provided to Congress or the Department of Defense inspector general.  

Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, said that many of the elements that make up the sphere found by Loeb can be found on Earth.   

A preliminary analysis conducted by Loeb’s team revealed that the spheres are made of 84 percent iron, 8 percent silicon, 4 percent magnesium, and 2 percent titanium, plus trace elements — all of which are elements found on Earth.   

Metzger and other scientists also said Loeb’s claim fails to take into consideration that these spheres could be bits of terrestrial meteorites or even pollution gathering on the ocean floor.   

It could take years for scientists to fully analyze the spheres to ascertain their origin.

If the spheres are from space, they would be a big discovery. But Metzger cautioned that researchers like Loeb, who make sensational claims without evidence to back them up, can do more harm than good for the larger scientific community.  

Loeb has made other claims in the past that have raised eyebrows.   

In 2017, a comet-like object passed through the solar system, puzzling astronomers. Loeb garnered attention with claims in a book he authored that the object was an alien spacecraft due to its odd shape.

Loeb has published more than 700 academic papers, making significant contributions to science in the fields of black holes and gravitational microlensing, which is a technique for studying objects in the universe that are shrouded in darkness.  

But the claims about UFOs have done some damage to his credibility with other scientists.  

“They say that falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it,” planetary scientist Jason Wright wrote on Twitter about Loeb’s claims over the spheres. “Perhaps seeing how the last claim went will help people contextualize this new one.”