Harvard astrophysicist Avi Lob, who has been scouring the sky for signs of extraterrestrial life for years, is confident he has found evidence of them at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Professor Lob has just completed the expedition worth $1.5 million, which aimed to find traces of a mysterious meteorite called IM1, which fell off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014 and, in his opinion, came from interstellar space.

His search began in 2019 when IM1 caught the attention of his research team while they were combing NASA open source catalog of meteors in search of irregular space rocks found around the Earth.

IM1 stood out for its high speed — it traveled faster than 95 percent of nearby meteorites — and the fact that it exploded much lower in Earth’s atmosphere than most meteors. The meteor’s official name is CNEOS 20140108, also known as IM1 (Interstellar Meteor).

The 61-year-old scientist said he led a team of deep sea explorers who found 50 tiny spherules, or droplets of molten metal, using a magnetic sled that was lowered from the Silver Star expedition ship 2km below the ocean’s surface.

He believes that these small objects, about half a millimeter in size, are most likely made of a steel-titanium alloy, which is much stronger than the iron found in ordinary meteorites.

Now further research is required, but Professor Lob believes they are either of interstellar origin or were created by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization.

Professor Lob headed the astronomy department at Harvard from 2011 to 2020 and now leads the Galileo Project at the university, which is building open observatories around the world to look for signs of UFOs and interstellar objects.