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probably 30, 40 pounds of it.

And people tried to explain it away as, well, a helicopter had a giant vat of molten metal, and then you calculate how far and how big a container you would have to have to carry molten metal of this type.

And so I analyzed it with a device that we invented in my lab actually called multiplex ion beam imaging, which is a kind of what's called secondary ion mass spec.

which what you do is you shoot a beam of ions at an object like a sandblaster.

It ionizes the material on the target, and then you shoot off and measure the mass of the objects that you just sandblasted off.

And so what we found was nothing unusual in terms of isotope ratios, except we found a mixture of metals that depending on where you looked in the sample was different.

So it would be like iron, titanium, and chromium of a certain ratio here, but a different ratio of those things over there and over here.

So what that meant was that whatever this stuff was,

didn't come completely premixed.

It wasn't like a milkshake.

It was a slurry of partially mixed materials that somebody decided to drop off.

So again, this is just data.

But my purpose of publishing it was first, and this was published in the Progress in Aerospace Sciences, peer-reviewed.

The purpose was to show you're not going to get thrown out of the academy for publishing this stuff.

As long as you don't make crazy conclusions and you just say, here's the data, to show people that you can publish this stuff as long as you're scientifically careful in how far you go, you leave yourself plenty of diplomatic exits in the verbiage that you use.

And it was part of what then got me to start the Soul Foundation.

along with Dave and others to say, look, it's okay to do this as long as you're careful.

And that's why people, I mean, Avi Loeb came after me because he had kind of the same pushback from his community where all he was doing was saying,

The question is on the table.

I'm not saying it's true.