Sound waves believed to have come from a meteor fireball off northern Papua New Guinea in 2014 were almost certainly the vibrations of a truck rumbling along a nearby road, according to new research conducted by Johns Hopkins University. These findings cast doubt on whether the material retrieved from the ocean last year was foreign material from this meteorite, as has been widely reported.

“The signal changed direction over time and matched exactly the path through the seismometer,” said Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins who led the research. “It’s really hard to get a signal and verify that it’s not from something. So what are we?” we can do “What we need to do is to show that there are many such signals and that they have all the characteristics we expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we expect from an asteroid.”

The team presented their findings March 12 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston.

Misinterpretation of meteor data

After a meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere over the western Pacific Ocean in January 2014, the event was linked to ground vibrations recorded at the seismic station on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. In 2023, it was determined that the materials on the ocean floor, where meteorite fragments were believed to have fallen, were of “extraterrestrial technological” (alien) origin.

However, according to Fernando, this assumption is based on misinterpreted data and the meteor actually entered the atmosphere from another place. Fernando’s team found no evidence of seismic waves from the meteor.

“The location of the fireball was actually very far from where the oceanography team went to retrieve these meteor fragments,” he said. “Not only were they using the wrong signal, they were also looking in the wrong place.”

Using data from stations designed to detect sound waves from nuclear tests in Australia and Palau, Fernando’s team determined the meteor’s most likely location to be more than 160 kilometers away from the area initially studied. They concluded that the materials pulled from the ocean floor were small particles of ordinary meteors or other meteors that fell to the Earth’s surface, mixed with terrestrial pollution.

“Everything found on the seafloor has nothing to do with this meteorite, whether it is a natural space rock or part of an alien spacecraft, but we strongly suspect that it is not alien,” Fernando said. he added.