Was Avi Loeb Led to His 'Alien Debris' Meteor by the Sound of a Truck?

Remember Avi Loeb, the Harvard professor who claims fragments of alien technology turned up in a high-speed meteor he retrieved from the waters off of Papua, New Guinea?

'Reanalysis of seismic data now suggests Loeb may have been looking for the meteor remnants in the wrong place,' writes the Washington Post:

The analysis, led by seismologist Benjamin Fernando of Johns Hopkins University, contends that sound waves purportedly from the meteor exploding in the atmosphere, and cited by Loeb as helping to locate the meteor's debris field, were most likely from a truck driving on a road near the seismometer.

'Interstellar signal linked to aliens was actually just a truck,' reads the headline on an announcement from Johns Hopkins University. 'The fireball location was actually very far away from where the oceanographic expedition went to retrieve these meteor fragments,' Fernando says in the announcement. 'Not only did they use the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place.'

Using data from stations in Australia and Palau designed to detect sound waves from nuclear testing, Fernando's team identified a more likely location for the meteor, more than 100 miles from the area initially investigated. They concluded the materials recovered from the ocean bottom were tiny, ordinary meteorites — or particles produced from other meteorites hitting Earth's surface mixed with terrestrial contamination.

'There are hundreds of signals that look just like this on that seismometer in Papua New Guinea in the days before and the days after,' Fernando told the Washington Post.
But the newspaper adds that 'Loeb, however, stands his ground.'

'The seismic data is completely irrelevant to the location of the meteor,' Loeb told The Washington Post. He said his team based its search coordinates primarily on satellite data from the United States military. A three-year analysis by the United States Space Command supported the hypothesis that the meteor's extreme velocity indicated an origin outside our solar system, Loeb said...

[Fernando] said his team believes the purported velocity of the meteor is the result of a measurement error by a sensor. 'We think the most likely case is it's a natural meteor from within our solar system,' he said.

In any case, Loeb is not done with the search. When he gets sufficient funding, he told The Post, he's going back to the Pacific in search of larger pieces of whatever splashed into the sea.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.