$2.2m mission to find 'possible spacecraft' crashed off Australian coast
A professor from Harvard University is on a $2.2 million recovery mission to determine if a mysterious meteorite that crashed near Australia almost a decade ago is a UFO.
As part of the expedition, astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who “definitely” believes extraterrestrials exist, will scour the floor of the southwestern Pacific Ocean for what he believes may be an alien spacecraft.
“The material of it is tougher than iron, based on the data, so the question is whether it’s just an unusual rock or perhaps a spacecraft from another civilisation,” he told Channel Seven’s Sunrise on Monday.
Professor working to capture UFO
The unknown object plummeted into the Pacific Ocean in 2014, about 160 kilometres off the coast of Australia’s neighbour, Papua New Guinea. Scientists believe it was traveling at 45 kilometres per second.
Earlier this year, the US Space Command confirmed the article came from another star system, and was the first interstellar meteor to ever hit earth.
But Professor Loeb, who heads up the Galileo Project, which is working to capture a high-definition image of a UFO, believes otherwise.
“We know that most of the stars were formed five billion years before the Sun,” he told Sunrise. “So there was plenty of time for any civilisation next to them, and there are tens of billions of them in the Milky Way galaxy alone, to send probes that would reach us.”
“Out of cosmic modesty we should assume that we are not the smartest kid in our cosmic neighbourhood and we can learn from them.”
Professor Loeb added that he has received full funding for the expedition to scoop the ocean floor and retrieve the object, and that any find would be displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
'We’re not alone in this universe'
Social media was divided over the news and whether extraterrestrial life exists.
“It’s pretty clear that we are now well past the point of asking if they exist and into the territory of who are they, why are they communicating with us and what does this mean for us,” one person wrote. “You're seriously brainwashed if you think that we are alone in this universe, or that they haven’t been here for years,” said another.
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While others were more cynical.
“Must be good to have money to spare on things like that,” one user wrote. “That’s one way of getting a free trip to paradise,” another said. “Amazing an alien aircraft can travel half way across the galaxy, maybe even further, then it reaches earth and crashes,” someone else added.
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