According to a recently released classified government document, in addition to entering the Solar System in 2014, an interplanetary object also landed on Earth and its debris fell into the Pacific.
Why has the government taken it upon itself to keep the fact that an interstellar object has crashed on Earth a secret? No official media outlet has provided an answer to that question.
The event was revealed by the Vice portal to astrophysics student and director of Interstellar Object Studies at Harvard’s Galileo Project, Amir Siraj.
The Interstellar Object Incident Siraj, together with Avi Loeb, wrote an article explaining that an interstellar object fell into the Pacific. But that news was kept secret.
The team apparently pored over NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) database of space rocks and meteorite impacts.
While searching for anomalies, they found a huge fireball that exploded near Manus Island in northern Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014.
The speed was in excess of 200,000 kilometres per hour and the duo identified it as a “small space rock” measuring 0.45 metres in diameter. Its origin could be deep within the Solar System or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way.
Siraj believes some of the sensors used by CNEOS are operated by the US Department of Defense to detect nuclear detonations.
Without key data on the margin of error for the fireball’s speed, the two scientists failed to pass peer review and publish the paper.
But that changed when her request for data reached Joel Mozer, chief scientist for Space Operations Command in the service component of the Space Force.
Restarting the investigationMost surprisingly, Siraj and Loeb discovered they had permission through a tweet from the Space Force. The message shows a memo dated March 1 and signed by Lt. Gen. John E. Shaw, deputy commander of the Space Force.
Upon learning this, Siraj and Loeb resumed their quest to publish the paper so that other expert researchers could search further for any other interstellar objects.
Siraj will also call on astronomers to build a public meteor sensor network independent of the Department of Defense. This would eliminate delays like the one in his research.
He also plans to organize an expedition to the place where the interstellar object fell:
“It would be very ambitious, but we are going to look at it in depth. Because the possibility of obtaining the first piece of interstellar material is exciting enough to test it very thoroughly. And I spoke to all the experts in oceanic expeditions to recover meteorites in the world.” Many people hope that this time the Space Force will not prevent the investigation, as there are still questions about why this information was hidden. Could it be that there is something else they do not want us to know or was it simply a “mistake”?
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