In Brief: Avi Loeb Teases Discovery of New Alien Spaceship, But It's Just a Comet

​Avi Loeb is back again with new claims about alien spaceships. Loeb recently claimed that an interstellar object detected on July 1 named 3I/ATLAS has a number of anomalies that suggest that it may be artificial in origin. Loeb claims that the object is “anomalously bright” and that the object is too large for a typical interstellar object. In a lengthy post on his blog, Loeb admitted that the object may well be a comet but that he wanted to hold out hope that it is not a comet but that it “was sent towards the inner solar system by design.” Loeb tellingly noted that his own hypothesis is “reminiscent of the science-fiction novel `Rendezvous with Rama,’ in which Arthur C. Clarke described the entry of a cylindrical 50-by-20 kilometers alien spaceship, not far from the inferred size of 3I/ATLAS, to the inner solar system.”
 
Well, can you guess what happened? As Penn State professor of astronomy and astrophysics Jason Wright noted in a thread on Bluesky, the object is very obviously a comet. Astronomers have observed and clearly reported the telltale coma, the gaseous atmosphere that envelops the nucleus, proving that Loeb overstated the anomalous nature of the object’s origin and overestimated its size, mistaking the coma for the surface. Loeb and his team, as Wright notes, misrepresents both the papers they cite and the science: “The cited papers are clear and conclusive, but they assert, without evidence, that they are inconclusive for reasons directly contradicted by the papers.”