Back in July, astronomers spotted an object rocketing toward the Solar System. It's scheduled for a high-speed drive-by of Jupiter, Venus, and Mars later this year, at which point scientists should be able to determine what it is. The consensus is that it's a comet, but a controversial Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Loeb, opined that it could be a self-propelled alien probe. And he isn't backing down on his claims. Recently, he suggested that light reflected by the object, dubbed "3I/ATLAS," isn't coming
from the sun but could be from an onboard power source, such as a nuclear reactor, both the Daily Mail and the New York Post reported.
You have to give it to Loeb, he's brought a fresh surge of credibility to the tatty annals of UFO lore. He hit the pop-culture radar screen when he argued that an earlier mystery object, Oumuamua, seen in 2017, might have been a vestige of alien tech. After 3I/ATLAS was discovered, he and some other researchers offered a largely speculative paper that suggested it indicated alien origins, as well. They hedged their bets, of course, calling their effort a "largely a pedagogical exercise" and concluding that "[b]y far the most likely outcome will be that 3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet."
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But What If It Isn't A Comet?
Loeb is opportunistically entertaining various explanations for why 3I/ATLAS displays unusual characteristics. The anomalous glow could be due to an alien nuke powerplant...or the object might have just picked up some nuclear material as it passed through the interstellar void. Amid the conjecture, congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna – a MAGA favorite from Florida who is no stranger to the UFO scene – has reportedly been in contact with Loeb about temporarily repurposing two probes to study 3I/ATLAS as it zooms past Jupiter and Mars.
Cynics might accuse Loeb of bolstering his micro-celebrity by maintaining a drumbeat of speculation about 3I/ATLAS, but although his views are controversial and he has ticked off some scientists who think his continued what-ifs are irresponsibly diminishing the work of other researchers, it probably doesn't hurt to think about how aliens might investigate Earth. A key insight from Loeb is that the trajectory of 3I/ATLAS is notably weird: when it nears our big blue marble, it will duck behind the Sun so we can't make any close observations.
Injecting New Life Into The Old UFO Lore
Truth be told, the whole UFO thing is starting to show its age. An investigative series published by the Wall Street Journal revealed that much of the Area 51 mythology was likely an elaborate, multi-decade psyop created by the government to distract the public from legitimate weapons development. Crashed flying saucers and autopsied aliens don't really feel all that 21st century. Enter Loeb, who offers that what we should really be looking for are possible ancient structures that are transitioning immense distances.
His ideas have caught on because there are some elements of the UFO community who aren't into denying physics. They understand that a single light year represents almost 6 trillion miles and that it's thoroughly improbable that alien intelligences could figure out how to cover that expanse (much less that they'd design their UFOs to function in our atmosphere). Different story if they started eons ago and engineered vessels that utilize the physics of space to go and go and go until they encounter something notable. That would mean they played the long game, and they didn't care if they were still around when their probes stumbled on other intelligences that could actually observe them.
For the record, I think 3I/ATLAS is a comet. But Loeb's doggedness has kind of won me over. And if we are able to ascertain that a nuclear reactor is humming away on the object, well...it would be a whole new world, right?
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