Is there life out there in the universe? This is perhaps one of the most compelling questions that haunts humanity. This is why some people take supposed evidence of extra-terrestrial visitation seriously – and the case of the strange metal shard that was recently subjected to scientific assessment (and no, it's probably not aliens) is a good example of this.

The shard, so the story goes, was supposedly part of an unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP) that crashed to Earth back in the late 1940s. This was the era of the Roswell incident that captured the imaginations of people across the world and continues to grasp them to this day. Although the supposed crashed Roswell UAP was little more than a US Air Force balloon, the idea that aliens visited the planet remains popular today.

Then there’s the strange shard of metal that ended up in the hands of the UFO hunting organization, To The Stars (co-founded by Tom DeLonge, also known as guitarist and vocalist for Blink-182). In 2019, a spokesperson told the New York Times that To The Stars had “exotic material samples from U.F.O.s” which they believed came from the original Roswell crash site.

The metal had the potential to rewrite history if it could be proven to be a legitimate piece of alien technology – and samples could be tested by for this exact purpose. This is where All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) comes in. This office of the US government investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) asked Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to analyze a sample of the material in 2022. The results of this work have recently been published.

The material itself is a magnesium (Mg) alloy. Although it mostly contains magnesium and zinc, the specimen also contains bismuth, lead and traces of other elements.

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