The big question in astrophysics right now is whether our solar system has been penetrated by a giant spaceship. A spaceship from a distant solar system. And from a distant civilization.
A spaceship that deliberately cruised past three separate planets, then hid behind the sun. Why swing behind the sun? Says Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, to release probes that would explore our planet.
Some UAV fans take this even farther. They speculate that this object will land at area 51.
What’s true and what’s not? Is this new object in the sky the biggest spaceship we have ever seen? Or is it just a comet?
The story begins in Rio Hurtado, Chile, on July 1st of this year, a few short months ago. NASA has a network of five telescopes designed as a robotic early warning system for supersized space rocks that may collide with earth. The way the meteor Chicxulub smacked into the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Called ATLAS, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, the network’s telescopes sit on mountain tops in Hawaii, Chile, South Africa, and Spain.
On July 1st, on a flat mountaintop near the foothills of the Andes mountain range in Chile, the astronomers on duty at the local Atlas telescope spotted a strange object. It was faint but stretched out, shaped like a comet. The ATLAS astronomers in Chile called this elongated smudge 3I/Atlas. And 3I/Atlas would turn out to be just plain weird.
3I/Atlas’ body was only a bit more than two miles around, but it weighed over 33 billion tons. And its tail was a gigantic 435,000 miles long. In other words 3I/Atlas’ tail alone was longer than the distance from the earth to the moon.
What’s more, most comets drag their tails behind them. 3I/Atlas appeared to have its tail out front. And 3I/Atlas has changed from reddish to greenish to bluish in the five months since we first observed it.
As it reached the sun, 3I/Atlas accelerated faster than mere gravity could explain. A fact that wasn’t discovered until November 1st.
3I/Atlas also traveled past three planets, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter, almost as if it was checking them out.
On top of all that, 3I/Atlas was speeding too fast, hitting our solar system at too strange an angle, and was made of too bizarre a mix of elements to come from our solar system. In other words, it came from someplace else in the galaxy.
These peculiarities caught the attention of Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. Loeb’s chosen task is to generate hypotheses about the strange things going on in space. Strange things whose peculiarities might, just might, be caused by alien technologies. And Loeb did not disappoint.
He speculated that 3I/Atlas might be a city-sized spacecraft, a spacecraft 100 times the size of Elon Musk’s gargantuan Starship. A spacecraft coming from a distant star to take care of business here on earth.
Loeb suggested that to lose the speed it takes for interstellar travel, to brake so it could stay with us a while and not just zip straight through our solar system, 3I/Atlas did a loop around our sun. Using a particularly hard to achieve deceleration path called a reverse Oberth maneuver.
While it was behind the sun on October 30th, speculated Loeb, 3I/Atlas may have sent out probes to earth.
What’s more, Loeb pointed out that 3I/Atlas had an unusually high ratio of nickel to iron. A ratio, said Loeb, that could only be produced by a technologically advanced civilization manufacturing an advanced alloy.
Plus, our solar system is shaped like a dinner plate. A normal object from another star would hit it at a random angle, would speed through the plate, and would go on its merry way. But not 3I/Atlas.
3I/Atlas, said Loeb, headed almost straight from the dinner plate’s edge to its very center and put itself in a swing around the sun, something Loeb said was almost impossible for a random object. Something that Loeb suggested involved “remarkable fine tuning.” Something that hinted at homing in on a target.
So when you’re thinking about 3I/Atlas, you have two choices. You can go along with the scientific consensus that this is just another dead but massive ball of matter accidentally passing through our solar system. Or you can take the Avi Loeb point of view, that 3I/Atlas might just be the biggest mothership we modern humans have ever seen.
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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s new book is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Not to mention in scientific journals like Biosystems, New Ideas in Psychology, and PhysicaPlus. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.institute
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References:
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Loeb, Avi, and Adam Crowl. Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology? Preprint submitted to the International Journal of Aerodynamic Control & Avionic Mechanics, July 16, 2025. arXiv:2507.12213.
SETI Institute. “Comet 3I/ATLAS Perihelion Update.” November 1, 2025. [https://www.seti.org/news/comet-3iatlas-perihelion-update/].
Statler, Tom. Quoted in “Major Anomaly’ As Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Measured To Be Over 33 Billion Tons.” IFLScience, September 25, 2025.[https://www.iflscience.com/](https://www.iflscience.com/).
NASA. “NASA’s Asteroid Tracking System Now Capable of Full-Sky Search.” NASA Science, August 2025. [https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/nasa-asteroid-tracking-system-now-capable-of-full-sky-search/].
Bolin, Bryce, et al. “Studying a Distant Visitor: What We Know About Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS.” The Planetary Society, September 22, 2025. Accessed November 5, 2025. [https://www.planetary.org/articles].
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The Times of India. “Explained: Why Controversial Harvard Astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s 3I/ATLAS Alien Theory Doesn’t Add Up.” October 31, 2025. [https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/science/explained-why-controversial-harvard-astrophysicist-avi-loebs-3i/atlas-alien-theory-doesnt-add-up/articleshow/124997454.cms].
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