ROCK'N A FAR PLACE

Scientists Say Entity Hurtling Through Space May Be Alien Spaceship

Professor Avi Loeb has never been afraid of giving time to unconventional theories.

A miles-wide entity hurtling through space at 37 miles per second could be an alien spaceship, scientists have warned. It was spotted by NASA in early July, with the agency dubbing it 3I/ATLAS. They, along with the majority of astronomers, believe it to be nothing more than a harmless comet that will not trouble planet Earth. Not Harvard astrophysics Professor Avi Loeb and his team, however, who think there is a chance the object could be a ship from an interplanetary species. Their paper hypothesizes that it could be an enormous mothership based on the identification of eight anomalies in its profile, each of which is rare. Speaking to the Daily Mail, Loeb—who has often been open-minded about aliens and is well-versed in unconventional theories—proposed the idea of sending a radio message along the lines of: “Hello, welcome to our neighborhood. Peace!” He noted this was not without risk, though, and instead could be received as a threat. His peers, meanwhile, think it’s a long-drifting comet that’s been racing through space for billions of years at 130,000mph—the fastest comet recorded. The same outlet reports Chris Lintott, an astronomer at Oxford University, said Loeb’s claim was “nonsense on stilts.”