“Abnormal” metal spheres were recovered from the Pacific Ocean in June. But according to several new studies, the microscopic balls are not fragments of an interstellar meteorite but the result of man-made industrial pollution.

Last summer, Harvard astrophysicist and extraterrestrial object hunter Avi Loeb said several small metal balls brought up from the ocean floor were likely the remains of an interstellar meteorite and might even contain traces of extraterrestrial technology. Now an independent analysis shows that the globules have a much less distant origin: They are most likely a byproduct of combustion on Earth.

Loeb and his colleagues found the micrometer-sized globules during a 2014 expedition off the coast of Papua New Guinea to search for fragments of a meteor passing through the atmosphere.

Based on the meteor’s recorded speed, Loeb and his team said the space rock was likely an interstellar object that left debris after disintegrating, spheres that scientists later found on the seafloor.

In several blog posts and a non-peer-reviewed article in the arXiv preprint database, Loeb described various “anomalous” properties of metal pellets. He focused specifically on five spheres containing high percentages of beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium. Loeb called these “BeLaU spheres”. He has since believed that the strange orbs may be evidence of alien technology.

Assuming the spheres actually come from space (which is highly debatable). If you start with the assumption that these particular pellets originated in space, their composition seems unusual. But as scientists noted in a recent paper published in the journal AAS Research Notes, they fit the pollutant profile of coal ash. This makes the meteorite’s origin “questionable,” wrote the study’s author, University of Chicago astronomer Patricio Gallardo.

Yes, the orbs may have come to Earth from outside the solar system, but NASA astrobiologist Caleb Scharf noted in I found evidence of technological civilization… right here on Earth.”

Loeb responded to these criticisms in a blog post on Medium, arguing that the authors of the new studies could not adequately assess the composition of the spherules without directly examining them. Source