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A meteorite that crashed into a New Jersey home contained 'alien world chemistry,' a new study says

Emily Bloch, The Philadelphia Inquirer on

Published in News & Features

New findings about an alien asteroid are out, and it’s all thanks to a New Jersey couple after an uninvited hazard crashed into their home two years ago.

In July 2024, a meteorite shot through the sky. Observers across the Northeast said they witnessed a fireball at the time.

Before reaching Earth, the asteroid had a mass of 115 pounds, according to calculations based on the fireball’s brightness, speed, and sonic boom. Most of the mass — which blazed through the atmosphere at 32,000 mph — was annihilated. The news went quiet.

NASA said at the time that the rock likely hadn’t survived. No one reported anything making it to the ground.

But in a quiet Hillsborough, N.J., residence, a couple’s home started violently shaking at around 11:15 a.m. The male homeowner — who requested anonymity citing privacy concerns — told the New York Times the crash caused a hole in the ceiling above his bed.

“Good thing I didn’t sleep in,” he told the Times. The meteorite fragment also had an odor: rotten, sulfurous, with fine black soot and dark rocks.

The Somerset County couple spent weeks gathering what would amount to about three pounds of extraterrestrial material, using disposable gloves, aluminum foil, and glass jars on the advice of scientists who would later study the findings in detail.

They painstakingly extracted every fleck of meteor dust they could find, using tape to peel microscopic bits off walls, and buying a new vacuum cleaner to exclusively suck up cosmic particles from the carpet, they told the Times.

“We were extremely meticulous,” one of the homeowners said. “The only thing we were missing were the hazmat suits.”

And they told no one about the meteorite except immediate family and the scientists — until now.

“Thanks to the homeowner’s quick reaction, these are the most pristine (meteorites) we know of,” said Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute (a nonprofit institute that studies extraterrestrial intelligence) and NASA’s Ames Research Center.

 

Two years later, the secret is out.

A journal published Wednesday by ScienceAdvances details the homeowners’ findings and the contents of the meteorite.

As it turns out, the fragments showed scientists that the meteorite was made of a rare and primitive material. The study also revealed that before the fragments broke off, the meteorite had been covered in brine. Meteor experts say that’s a new observation and suggests the meteorite’s parent asteroid had liquid water that evaporated.

Researchers said high concentrations of salt in brines could “create molecules crucial to life on Earth.” The meteorite also held a mix of soluble organic compounds, including amino acids, and compounds found in blood and used in photosynthesis in living organisms.

Does that mean we absolutely have proof of aliens now? Not so fast.

But experts say it does help scientists understand what building blocks of life may have been delivered to the early Earth.

Now that the study of the meteorite is wrapped, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City will receive some of the fragments.

“We are thrilled that nature delivered such a precious asteroid sample on our doorstep,” museum curator Denton Ebel told CBS.

As for the meteorite’s name? It wasn’t New Jersey-born, but it sure was New Jersey-bred. The meteorite was named Hillsborough, for the roof it crashed through and the couple who helped preserve it.

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©2026 The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC. Visit at inquirer.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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