In Brief: You’ll Never Guess What This “Crashed UFO” Debris Isn't: Extraterrestrial

​Regular readers will remember the many claims To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science and its affiliated ufologists made about pieces of metal they claim to be likely debris from crashed flying saucers. TTSA ufologists like Hal Puthoff claimed that one of the most important pieces of supposed evidence, the infamous magnesium-bismuth fragment of a crashed 1947 flying saucer (pictured at left), had impossibly advanced properties, including “inertial mass reduction” and may have a “metamaterial” used for interdimensional travel as a “terahertz waveguide.” When TTSA first hyped the piece, I suggested it was a chunk of industrial waste, accounting for its unusual composition. 

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office sent it to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for testing in 2022. The report recently came back—yes, it took two years—and determined that the material was not able to function as a “terahertz waveguide,” and its isotopic composition was completely normal for Earth, not, as TTSA claimed, extraterrestrial. They could not identify a purpose for the uncommon composition of the earthly, heat-damaged fragment, but that’s probably because it never had a purpose. They suggest it is consistent with experiments of the time, without naming them. In short, it's probably a piece of scientific or industrial waste.