Extraterrestrial

July 23, 2026

Toward the back of Tuesday’s local newspaper was a USA Today article about a meteorite that crashed into a New Jersey house two years ago.  This became today’s news when researchers published their findings about the meteorite in the journal Science Advances on July 15th.  Peter Jenniskens, the lead author and a meteor astronomer from the SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, said, “A forensic study of the fragments revealed that they contained preserved bits from near the surface of a primitive asteroid where it experienced concentrated salty fluids – a process not previously known from this type of proto planet world.”  The study looked at the meteorite, which weighed more than two pounds when it shot through the roof of a house in Hillsborough, New Jersey, 48 miles southwest of New York.  Mike Zolensky, the papers’ coauthor and a meteoriticist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and his colleague, JangMi Han, found small, salt-rich fragments of the meteor, suggesting it originated from an area near the asteroid’s surface where water evaporated and caused salt to concentrate in the area.  The discovery is not definite proof of extraterrestrial life, but it could bring researchers closer to finding how life originated on Earth.

When I went online, I found extraterrestrial life, or alien life (colloquially aliens), is life that originates from another world rather than on Earth.  No extraterrestrial life has yet been detected.  Such life might range from simple forms such as microbes to intelligent beings, possibly bringing forth civilizations that might be far more, or far less, advanced than humans.  The Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy and speculates about the existence of sapient life elsewhere in the universe.  The science of extraterrestrial life is known as astrobiology.  Speculation about inhabited worlds beyond Earth dates to antiquity.  Early Christian writers discussed ideas from thinkers like Democritus and Epicurus about countless worlds in the vast universe and pre-modern writers typically assumed extraterrestrial “worlds” were inhabited by living beings.  Descartes wrote that there was no means to prove the stars were not inhabited by “intelligent creatures”, but their existence was a matter of speculation. 

While the researchers never found any form of extraterrestrial life on the meteorite, they did say the highly concentrated salt brines found can “create molecules crucial to life on Earth,” and this could provide researchers with new insight into how asteroid chemistry shaped life on Earth.  A meteorite is a rock that survives entry into the Earth’s atmosphere and hits the ground.  This rock was traveling at 32,000 mph (51499 kph) when it entered Earth’s atmosphere on July 16, 2024.  The owner of the home where the meteorite crashed said he collected pieces of it while wearing disposable gloves and using aluminum foil to place fragments of the meteorite into glass jars.  The owner said, “I was at home at the time, heard a loud crash and found a hole in the ceiling of the master bedroom.  I smelled a strong sulfur-like odor and saw many black fragments along with debris and black dust that covered my bed, carpet and surrounding areas.”

THOUGHTS: The man deciding it was a good idea to pick up the pieces of meteorite obviously never saw the 1958 extraterrestrial movie The Blob, starring Steve McQueen in his first leading role. The film concerns a carnivorous amoeboid alien that crashes to Earth from outer space inside a meteorite.  The extraterrestrial envelops living beings to grow larger.  It is finally stopped by freezing it with CO2 fire extinguishers.  Perhaps the homeowner kept a fire extinguisher next to him while he picked up the pieces.  Act for all.  Change will come and it starts with you.