Avi Loeb

This is a sled with magnets on top of it.

You can see the Netflix team at the lower left here.

And then I brought the materials in this suitcase that you see here.

I shipped it by FedEx to my home.

This was a $1.5 million expedition.

Because I was worried that somewhere in the airport they would say, no, we have to confiscate that.

I don't want to take any risk.

Here you can see the material.

So it's mostly sand from the bottom of the ocean, two kilometers deep, one mile or so, a little more than a mile.

And then we found these molten droplets, you see, that are very distinct relative to grains of sand.

And we isolated them.

You can see here these molten droplets.

And it turns out that 10% of them did not have the composition of materials from the solar system.

And so we studied them in the laboratory of my colleague at Harvard, Stein Jacobson.

And I had a summer intern, Sophie Bergstrom, that found 850 of those molten droplets that allowed us to do the analysis.

How did my colleagues respond to that?

They said, oh, he went to the wrong place because there was a seismic signal that could have been misidentified and could have been a truck passing nearby.

And so a reporter from the New York Times said,

oh, they went to the wrong place because it was not a meteor, it was a truck.

And I wrote to the reporter and I said, how irresponsible are you?