In 2014, a meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere and burst apart in the air above the ocean near the Pacific island nation of Papua New Guinea, probably scattering tiny fragments along the seabed. Meteors that burn up in the atmosphere and leave small traces are not unusual— NASA estimates nearly 50 tons of space rock falls on the Earth every day—but Harvard astrophysicist Avi Leob recently made headlines when he suggested this particular meteor, dubbed CNEOS 2014-01-08 or IM1, may actually have been a piece of an alien spacecraft.
Many of Loeb’s colleagues in the fields of astrophysics and the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Life, or SETI, are highly skeptical of his claims. They’ve also cast doubt on the evidence that CNEOS 2014-01-08 is truly an interstellar object. But Loeb’s claim—and the responding criticism—raise important questions: Just how do you decide whether you’ve found evidence of alien life when the data are often so small, far or away, or just ambiguous? And how do you share your findings?
”It’s a big problem,” Jason Wright, a professor of astronomy at Penn State. “We call these the post-detection protocols in SETI.”
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