Dr Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, believes we could find out whether aliens exist in less than a month.
The researcher and his team have recently been running tests on fragments of a meteor that plunged to Earth back in 2014.
The meteor, known as CNEOS 2014-01-08, was detected by the Catalina Sky Survey, which looks out for comets and asteroids that could threaten Earth.
It was travelling at an incredible speed of 28 miles per second, which is much faster than any known asteroid or comet. This led Dr Loeb to believe that the meteor may have been of interstellar origin, meaning it came from another star system.
‘This meteor was special in the sense that it was very fast,’ Avi told the Daily Star.
‘It was moving faster than 95% of the nearby stars near the Sun because of some propulsion it had,’
In 2022, Dr Loeb and his team recovered fragments of the meteor from the Pacific Ocean.
Dr Loeb was able to narrow the estimated point at which it hit the water using seismograph readings and spent two weeks trawling a 6.2 square mile stretch of the seabed in a £1.2 million operation.
The recovered metallic beads – measuring up to 0.7mm in diameter – are being analysed in Germany, Papua New Guinea and at two universities in the US.
These fragments were found to be made of a strange alloy of steel and titanium that is much stronger than any known natural material leading him to believe that the meteor may have been a piece of alien technology.
‘There is a chance that it’s artificial – that it’s a spacecraft,’ said Dr Loeb.
The scientist also said that the meteor was made of a material that was tougher than all the 272 space rocks in the Nasa catalogue over the past decades.
He believes that they are in the process of finding out what the meteor was made of and whether it is alien technology ‘within a month’.
‘I am expecting further news within a month. That’s the hope,’ said Loeb.
However, Dr Loeb’s claims about the meteor have been met with some scepticism by other scientists who think the evidence is not strong enough. Others have accused him of sensationalism.
Several colleagues have even refused to peer review Dr Loeb’s work, the process by which scholars evaluate one another’s research to ensure that only high-quality studies are published.
This news follows recent whistleblower claims alleging the US government of hiding evidence of alien life.
MORE : Star Trek legend William Shatner gives his verdict on bombshell UFO claims
MORE : Whistleblower suggests aliens or non-human vehicles have injured people
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