From a New York Times story by Katrina Miller headlined “Deep Dive for Alien Life Turns Divisive”:

On Jan. 8, 2014, a fireball from space blazed through Earth’s atmosphere and crashed into the sea, north of Manus Island off the northeastern coast of Papua New Guinea. Its location, velocity and brightness were recorded by U.S. government sensors and quietly tucked away in a database of similar events.

That data sat for five years, a source of no contention until Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University, and Amir Siraj, then an undergraduate student at the university, stumbled across it in 2019. Based on its logged speed and direction, Mr. Siraj identified the fireball as an extreme outlier.