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Astrophysicist Avi Loeb, the former chairman of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy and current head of Harvard’s Galileo Project, which searches for evidence of alien life, has made a lot of unusual claims over the years about aliens and UFOs. His latest is that Comet 3I/Atlas might be an alien spacecraft.
Loeb made this claim in a research paper published in July. He followed that up with an article in which he posits that 3I/Atlas could be traveling to the opposite side of the Sun to intentionally “avoid detailed observations from Earth-based telescopes.” It is also traveling so fast that “our best rockets reach at most a third of that speed.”
“The consequences, should the hypothesis turn out to be correct, could potentially be dire for humanity, and would possibly require defensive measures to be undertaken, though these might prove futile,” he wrote in another article.
NASA responds to Loeb’s claims
NASA, which as one would expect, has been studying Comet 3I/Atlas and has come to their own conclusions. Not surprisingly, they don’t match up with Professor Loeb’s ideas.
“It looks like a comet. It does comet things. It very, very strongly resembles, in just about every way, the comets that we know,” said Tom Statler, NASA lead scientist for solar system small bodies.
“It has some interesting properties that are a little bit different from our solar system comets, but it behaves like a comet. And so the evidence is overwhelmingly pointing to this object being a natural body. It’s a comet.”
While the comet is interstellar, meaning it is not gravitationally bound to any particular star, that doesn’t mean it is alien-made, according to Statler.
“Comets are mixtures of dust and ice, they’re being heated by the sun, that heating is changing, and exactly how they respond to that is something that’s a bit unpredictable,” he said.
“So even in our solar system, comets can have a history of suddenly brightening if there’s, say, a particular pocket of ice that sublimates quickly and drives off a large amount of dust. It’s the sort of thing that our comet observers and experts are prepared for, and presents an opportunity to get more information.”
Statler added that interstellar comets like 3I/Atlas aren’t new. It’s just that “we’ve just recently had the ability to discover them, and we’ve discovered only three so far.”
Other theories put forth by Loeb
The other two interstellar objects to be discovered are Oumuamua and Comet Borisov. Loeb has claimed that Oumuamua, a 1,300-foot long cigar-shaped asteroid that first appeared in our solar system in 2017, could also be an alien spaceship.
Then again, Avi Loeb has also suggested that our universe may have been formed in a lab by an “advanced technological civilization,” that there could be as many as a quadrillion alien spacecrafts traveling in our solar system, and that aliens may have visited Earth using dimension-hopping technology to travel through hidden dimensions. So he has a whole array of interesting ideas.