On March 11, 2025, Cosmos Magazine published an article by Lauren Fuge about the scientific expedition to retrieve materials from the fireball site of the first interstellar meteor in the Pacific Ocean. I led this expedition in June 2023 based on data from U.S. government satellites, which detected the location of the fireball and reported about it on an official NASA database. The reliability of the satellite data was double-checked by the U.S. Space Command and reported to NASA in an official letter, accessible here.
Despite these facts, the Cosmos article was titled “Alien Signal Was Actually Just a Truck,” and quoted a critic who stated that “The fireball location was actually very far away from where the oceanographic expedition went to retrieve these meteor fragments… Not only did they use the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place.”
Lauren reported this statement without contacting me for comments before publication. After the report was published, the chief editor of Cosmos magazine, Ian Mannix, wrote to me, with Lauren on the Cc, and asked if I had any comment on this report. My response to him and Lauren was as follows:
“Dear Ian,
The search region of the meteor was defined as the location of the fireball detected by U.S. government satellites on January 8, 2014. This fireball released a percent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy and its flash of light could not have been caused by a truck. The seismic signal considered by our critics was just supplementary. It was taken by one seismometer and could not have defined our search region but only a circular band around the seismometer.
I explained these points in a preprint, posted here. For the expedition analysis results, see the peer-reviewed papers, published here and here. We are currently analyzing the isotopic composition of the materials we retrieved.
With kind regards,
Avi”
Following my response, Cosmos magazine published a day later a shorter report by Evrim Yazgin, titled “Physicist Maintains `Alien’ Material Found on Seafloor”. Ian has kindly alerted me to this second post after it was published and explained: “We went for the separate item, partly because of time zones, partly because you have given us sufficient material to create an article, which has a stronger focus.”
In response, I wrote:
“Dear Ian and Lauren,
It is unfortunate that Lauren’s article went out without including my response. Many people tweeted about Lauren’s report which involves defamation of the scientific integrity of the expedition. I am very disappointed that this report was authorized without speaking with me to hear my response. An example of a tweet about Lauren’s article, accessible here, received more than 20,000 views.
I have seen no tweet whatsoever about the latest report, which is ignored by those who read the first report. Negativity carries more power than integrity in a `cancel culture’. It is easier to destroy than to build. This is why terrorism is as powerful as the authority of nations.
But even your second report made the following claim without checking with me: “ In any case, experts are skeptical that Loeb’s team uncovered material from an interstellar object. They say it is more likely that its composition is the result of pollution from Earth-based materials.”
We have actually published a paper that shows, based on the analysis of 60 elements from the periodic table, that the chemical composition of the unique BeLaU spherules recovered does not match any known materials from Earth. See Figure 1c in the paper posted here. This provides another example of statements made by critics without any substance behind them.
Science is about evidence and if Cosmos magazine wanted to provide an unbiased presentation of all available information to the readers, you should have checked with me before publishing any of these claims. This is not about time zones but about integrity. Needless to say, I am disappointed.
Avi”
At an era when misinformation is prevalent on social media and the press, I can only hope that future reports about science will display the full scientific information to the public. Am I asking for too much? Without attending to unbiased reports about science, how can we hope to do better in the realm of politics?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
