Signals Linked to ‘Aliens’ Debunked as Noise From Truck

A burst of sound waves detected in 2014 that was thought to have come from a meteor plunging into the Earth’s atmosphere—and rumored to have possibly been from interstellar space—may not have been from a meteor at all.

The theory that the meteor could have been alien in origin and arrived from deep space further blossomed after materials were pulled from the ocean last year, near where the meteor was thought to have crashed north of Papua New Guinea.

Now, however, new research set to be presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas on March 12 reveals that the signals thought to have come from the meteor may actually have been caused by a truck driving down a nearby road.

“The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” research lead Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement.

“It’s really difficult to take a signal and confirm it is not from something,” he went on. “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.”

The meteor was thought to have entered the atmosphere over the western Pacific in January 2014, according to ground vibration data recorded at a seismic station on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. However, now that these signals have been identified as coming from a truck driving down a road, it’s suspected that the meteor entered the atmosphere at a different location.

“The fireball location was actually very far away from where the oceanographic expedition went to retrieve these meteor fragments,” Fernando said. “Not only did they use the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place.”

According to the new research, the meteor may have entered the atmosphere about 100 miles away from the site where it was initially thought to have arrived.

A non-peer-reviewed pre-print paper suggested that the materials found on the seafloor in 2023 came from this meteor and were interstellar in origin. This assumption came from the high speed at which the meteor was recorded arriving at Earth.

“The object’s speed relative to the Local Standard of Rest of the Milky Way galaxy, 60 [kilometers per second], was higher than 95% of the stars in the Sun’s vicinity,” the paper’s authors wrote. “In 2022 the US Space Command issued a formal letter to NASA certifying a 99.999% likelihood that the object was interstellar in origin.”

The paper suggested that the abundance of certain elements in the materials found in the ocean didn’t match those of any planet in the solar system, suggesting they could have had an alien origin.

“The “BeLaU” [beryllium, lanthanum and uranium] abundance pattern suggests that [the materials] may have originated from a highly differentiated crust of a planet with an iron core outside the solar system,” the authors wrote. “Another possibility is that this unfamiliar abundance pattern may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin.”

However, this theory appears to have been discounted completely with the new research on the origin of the seismic signals. The researchers suggest that the materials found on the ocean floor were smaller meteorites from past impacts or even particles produced from other meteorites hitting Earth’s surface, mixed with contamination from the Earth.

“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.

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