By Rich Tenorio

9 November 2025, 3:34 am

Prof. Avi Loeb appears on the Joe Rogan Experience, October 28, 2025. (YouTube screenshot)

Israeli-born Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, no stranger to controversy, is once again drawing attention — and taking flak — for positing that an interstellar object might be a piece of extraterrestrial technology. This time, it’s an object called 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar visitor to our solar system, predicted to pass roughly 167 million miles from Earth in December.

Loeb has theorized that the comet, which is estimated to be one or two city blocks in width, could pose a threat to humanity. NASA has dismissed his claims out of hand.

Loeb looks to recent history to explain why academia shouldn’t be so skeptical.

“On October 7, [2023], there was evidence from data collected by Israeli intelligence agencies of what Hamas was about to do,” Loeb told The Times of Israel in a phone interview. “They dismissed it. They had a theory that it was very unlikely Hamas would do something like that. They ignored anomalies in the data.”

Recently, Loeb has been pointing out what he says are multiple anomalies related to 3I/ATLAS. He’s been in this place before: Eight years ago, in 2017, he also publicized anomalies pertaining to the first-ever interstellar object known to humanity, ‘Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “scout”).

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“With 3I/ATLAS, the anomalies are quite different” from ‘Oumuamua,” Loeb said.

He had been puzzled by the shape of ‘Oumuamua, which he described as like a pancake, not a comet. When it comes to 3I/ATLAS, multiple factors mystify him.

This image provided by NASA/European Space Agency shows an image captured by Hubble of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on July 21, 2025, when the comet was 277 million miles from Earth. (NASA/European Space Agency via AP)

“Its path in the plane, the ecliptic plane of the planets around the sun, is [aligned by] five degrees,” Loeb said. “The chance of [this happening] at random is one in 500. Its size is very anomalous … 1 million times more massive than ‘Oumuamua.” Its composition contains “nickel and very little iron, the way we find in industry rich alloys with aerospace application.” And, he said, its jet path was “not away from the Sun like comets … In July and August, the glow extended from the object towards the Sun, not away.”

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This week, Loeb invited Kim Kardashian to join his research team after the reality star tweeted asking for the “tea” on 3I/ATLAS — and received a response from NASA acting administrator Sean Duffy, to the chagrin of Loeb and other critics who slammed Duffy for responding to Kardashian while ignoring an official inquiry from Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna.

On October 28, Loeb appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and raised eyebrows when he compared 3I/ATLAS to, potentially, a tennis ball that a neighbor tossed into our backyard.

The purpose of this analogy was a gentle critique of what he called a top priority of science: searching for chemical signs of life — oxygen, water, methane, carbon dioxide — in the atmosphere of exoplanets that are a similar distance from a star as the Earth is from the Sun. He likened such exoplanets to houses on a street, and asked why go further down the street to explore other houses without examining mysterious objects in one’s own backyard.

“A resident of the street,” Loeb said, “may throw a tennis ball we might find in our backyard, or send a package to our mailbox, or visit our front door.”

“Suppose this is a visit from alien technology to the solar system,” he said. “It’s something we should all know about. It would change everything… Even if the probability is small, we must consider such scenarios as 3I/ATLAS being a threat, something like a Trojan horse [that looks] completely innocent from the outside, something that will change history forever.”

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Prof. Avi Loeb at the Harvard College Observatory, March 1, 2022. (Courtesy of Leslie Kean)

Loeb takes pride in the fact that his articles and media appearances have had an outsized impression on young people, if not always having the impact he’d like on his peers. He marshaled some qualitative evidence: A NASCAR driver featured Loeb’s image and 3I/ATLAS on his race car. A US Air Force pilot’s daughter now wants to be a scientist after hearing about Loeb. It got her a mention on Rogan’s podcast and kudos from her school principal. Similarly, a Times of London reporter who interviewed Loeb for an article told his children about it, and now they, too, want to go into science.

“There is an appeal,” Loeb said, about the “fundamental questions that will affect our future, which we can address with scientific curiosity. It appeals to kids and the public.”

He noted that his own career in physics has spanned 50 years, which he pointed out is half of the lifespan of modern physics. He mused over this fact while attending a conference at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.

Prof. Avi Loeb, center, smiles as he and fellow scientists work off the coast of Papua New Guinea in June 2023 to identify parts of a possible interstellar meteor that crashed in 2014. (Courtesy of Loeb)

In that very auditorium, scientific minds such as Wolfgang Pauli had founded quantum mechanics. Loeb sat on a wooden bench once occupied by Pauli, and while it was physically uncomfortable, it was mentally stimulating. He said he yearned to be there 95 years ago in a time he described as more receptive to out-of-the-box thinking than now.

He told The Times of Israel that when he submitted an academic paper about 3I/ATLAS, he wrote in the last sentence that the object might be targeting our solar system. An editor accepted the paper, but on the condition that Loeb remove the final sentence.

“This is an example from the modern world of what the Vatican did at the time of Galileo,” Loeb said. “People have their own prejudices. I don’t have any problem with that.”

“The whole idea of doing science is to maintain an agnostic point of view, be curious, wonder over the possibilities,” he said. “It’s what makes science exciting.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/astronomer-avi-loeb-warns-world-not-to-ignore-new-comets-potential-alien-threat/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5795375&forum_id=2!#49415151)