For the past few months there has been growing hype about interstellar object 3I/ATLAS being an extraterrestrial spacecraft – and not just among the UFO community or those overly online: I’ve had a few people I know offline, who would generally have no interest in these topics, asking me about it.
A lot of this hype has come from news media picking up statements made by esteemed Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who for quite some time now has been posting about all the various anomalies related to 3I/ATLAS on his Medium blog (as of today, he is listing 12 anomalies). These carefully non-committal blog posts by Loeb, where he nevertheless excitedly notes ‘anomalies’ with the interstellar object, unfortunately lead to news stories that extrapolate his posts into sensationalist headlines such as “New evidence ‘proves’ the ‘potentially hostile alien threat’ isn’t a comet” – despite Loeb already having stated in a paper that “by far the most likely outcome will be that 3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet”.
Loeb has played this game before of course, first with the now-famous ‘Oumuamua, and also with the lesser known CNEOS 2014-01-08 which crashed into the ocean near Papua New Guinea – it seems every interstellar object is a possible spacecraft to the Harvard astrophysicist.
This week astronomer Jason Wright wrote an excellent explainer on why Loeb’s 3I/ATLAS ‘anomalies’ are not actually indicators of an extraterrestrial spacecraft (there were only 10 anomalies listed by Loeb at the time Wright wrote his piece; it has since expanded to 12). Wright noted that Loeb’s approach in saying that 3I/ATLAS is probably a comet, while also posting multiple ‘anomalies’, “gives him plausible deniability of the bad-faith ‘just asking questions’ variety while still making the comet sound weird enough that lots of people are thinking (or worried!) that it’s an alien spacecraft.” The upside for Loeb, as Wright points out, is that it “certainly gets him lots of TV time and fan mail.”
Loeb has apparently repudiated his original argument about the Duck Test for 3I/ATLAS. He first argued that if it acted like a comet as it approached the sun by growing a coma and tail and exhibiting cometary features that that would mean it’s a comet. When evidence for a coma emerged he first dismissed it as being poor observational technique, and then when the same conclusion was reached with Hubble Space Telescope data he called it “model dependent.”
Then once the coma (and tail) became inarguable he switched gears and said that a spacecraft should have those things after all! He has now explicitly written that no matter how much it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck, he will find ways to insist it’s at least 20% likely to be an alien spacecraft.
It’s worth noting that Wright is not some ultra-skeptical protector of the status quo – he is a scientist who loves a bit of speculative ETI theorizing, who we’ve covered previously here on the Grail: he’s the director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, searching for alien technosignatures via astronomical enigmas such as ‘Tabby’s Star’, and has previously suggested we search our own solar system for artifacts of ancient technological species.
Wright makes clear in his blog post that the most important thing to understand is that lots of comets are anomalous: “no two seem quite alike”, and given 3I/ATLAS is interstellar in origin we should expect it not to be a normal comet. And the other thing he points out is that “zero planetary scientists give Avi’s claims any credence”, and the reason is that Loeb is “demonstrably wrong”. Wright goes through each ‘anomaly’ one-by-one, pointing out the problems with Loeb’s claims, and concludes that “none of them are evidence it’s a spacecraft”. And furthermore, while “there’s no reason spacecraft would do” the anomalous things Loeb is listing, “there are lots of reasons comets from another solar system would.”
It is perhaps past time that we stopped with the hype about 3I/ATLAS being an alien spacecraft (it’s still pretty damn cool that it’s an interstellar object!) And perhaps also, it’s about time that more criticism was leveled at Avi Loeb for his approach to writing about these interstellar objects, and some questions asked about why he continues to do this. Perhaps it is to help raise funds for his Galileo Project. Or perhaps he just likes being the center of attention.
As astrophysicist Hector Socas-Navarro wrote recently:
Loeb frequently preaches humility (he says that he learned it by working in a farm), which, in my view, is almost comically ironic. Because his actual conduct exemplifies quite the opposite. He acts like a driver who sees every other car traveling in the opposite direction and concludes that everyone else must be going the wrong way. He positions himself as the only one who has discovered the truth, asserting that all other scientists (experts in fields where he is not) are simply wrong. Even if he were correct, I struggle to recall bolder statements in the history of science, perhaps aside from Descartes’ claim that he intentionally omitted some findings, so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovering them.
Loeb’s brand of “humility” often turns the principle upside down. In his narrative, holding the truth becomes proof of modesty, and disagreement is merely evidence of other people’s arrogance. Not only is he the one who has seen the truth, he even went so far as to suggest that 3I/ATLAS might have been an intelligence test set by a superior alien civilization. Accordingly, in his own story, he would be the only scientist to pass the alien IQ test.
…I have rarely seen a public figure express themselves with such unapologetic self-importance…
I found Socas-Navarro’s take interesting, because over the years I’ve noticed Loeb regularly posting about what he thinks is some breakthrough insight he’s had into the UFO topic, when he’s just restating thoughts and ideas that had already been brought up by researchers for many decades.
In the end though, Socas-Navarro notes, “the problem is not Avi Loeb himself, but the cultural ecosystem that rewards spectacle over substance.” Part of that problem is, as I already mentioned, a news media that sees profit in sensationalist headlines. But in my opinion, another part of that problem is the social media ecosystem that favours sensation over fact, and the growing army of ‘ET or die’ believers that inhabit places like ‘UFO Twitter’, and also the influencers who take advantage of them with misinformation and hype. The lesson, Socas-Navarro says, “is that science must learn to communicate wonder” in order to reach everyday audiences better – though “without surrendering rigor.”
If anyone feels that the criticism of Avi Loeb’s approach is a bit harsh, it might be worth remembering what happened back in the mid-1990s when people began suggesting that Comet Hale Bopp was concealing an extraterrestrial spacecraft: 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult died in a mass suicide, hoping to be teleported to the spaceship which they believed was flying behind the comet.
——————
This story originally mistakenly included images of 3I/ATLAS breaking up, when it was in fact C/2025 K1 (ATLAS).
