NEWS AND VIEWS – PAPUA NEW GUINEA: The administrators of Papua New Guinea have alleged that the United States have stolen what could be the remnants of an alien spacecraft from its waters off Manus Island. Astrophysicist Professor Avi Loeb and his team from Harvard recovered the small bead-like metallic fragments of meteor IMI which came from intrasellar space and plunged through the earth’s atmosphere in 2014.
They found the ‘alien beads’ off Manus Island which is 260 miles north of Papua New Guinea’s mainland. Allegedly they did not seek and receive formal permission from the PNG government to recover the objects according to Penua George Polon, deputy administrator of Manus Province.
They came here. No one knew about it and now they’ve gone. What have they found? Does it have value? Do we have rights over it? If it’s scientific research, how are our scientific institutions going to benefit?
Mr Polon
Because of the recovered material’s toughness, Loeb believes that it could be of ‘technological origin’ or in other words the remains of an interstellar alien spacecraft.
One of Loeb’s collaborators, Amir Siraj, said:
The discovery of material from an interstellar meteor would be an enormous scientific achievement. To put it in context, an estimate for the time it would take to fetch a sample from the nearest star system is comparable to the age of our species [200,000 years]. By contrast, nature may have delivered an interstellar gift to our doorstep, which has taken less than a decade to retrieve.
Amir Siraj
As for the allegations of failing to seek permission to take the remnants, Rob McCallum, the expedition leader said:
Permitting procedures focus on the extraction of existing biological or geological material, which this is not. This research recovered grains of sand that are from outside the area/PNG/Earth, and have no known economic or commercial value.
Rob McCallum
That seems a rather weak response to the allegations. It is unlikely to be an alien craft although Loeb has booked the video screen in Times Square, New York to present the finding! He thinks he might win the Nobel Prize! Ambition. This points to their alleged behaviour in recovering the fragments which it seems to me belong to PNG. The objects have a cultural significance and they could be a tourist attraction. They also have intellectual value according to Wilson Thompson of the National Research Institute.
Loeb’s team may have broken the law by removing rare objects without notifying the state. Criminal charges are possible.
There has been an interesting follow-up to this story in the news media. The Times of July 12 states that the “meteor theft” threatens to blow the US defence deal to smithereens”. Richard Parry reports that Papua New Guinea’s government is under pressure to abandon a security agreement with the United States. The leader of opposition is demanding that America return the fragments of the meteor.
It is said that the incident has undermined the relationship between America and Papua New Guinea because the former can no longer trust the latter. This is a serious matter because it comes at a time when the US wants to strengthen its security links with the country in order to counter the growing influence of China in the Pacific.
