An ‘interstellar visitor’ spotted drifting into our solar system weeks ago is either a massive dirty snowball or an alien probe.
At least, this is according to a leading UFOlogist and a Harvard theoretical physicist, who believe the massive object could have been sent by an otherworldly civilisation.
The object, known as 3I/ATLAS, is flying between the orbits of the asteroid belt and Jupiter and will soon loop around the Sun.
3I/ATLAS is still slightly too far away for experts to know for sure what it is, but it’s been officially classified as a comet.
Mark Christopher Lee, a UFOlogist and film-maker, has mixed feelings about 31/ATLAS.
He told Metro: ‘The UFOlogist film-making side of me goes: We could get evidence of actual first contact by Christmas!
‘The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is due to pass by Earth just before Xmas. Some have speculated that this may be intentional if it is proven to be some kind of alien probe or Mothership.’
However, the ‘scientist’ in Lee said that we need more data before speculating what the object could be.
‘These are indeed weird times in the world and throughout mankind’s history, we have always looked into the stars for meaning and guidance and in 2025, we need it more than ever,’ Lee added.
Avi Loeb, a professor of science at Harvard University, told Newsweek that 3I/ATLAS’ ‘retrograde orbital plane’ is just five degrees from that of Earth.
He said: ‘The likelihood for that coincidence out of all random orientations is 0.2%.’
A retrograde orbit means a celestial body, such as a moon or a planet, zooms around its host in the opposite direction to the host’s rotation.
Given how bright 3I/ATLAS is, which scientists say suggests it’s a glowing comet rather than a dull asteroid, Loeb said this shows it’s around 12 miles wide.
This is ‘too large for an interstellar asteroid’, he said, adding: ‘It might have targeted the inner Solar System as expected from alien technology.’
Current estimates say that 3I/ATLAS will be closest to the Sun in late October before zooming off back into the abyss of space.
‘This could be intentional to avoid detailed observations from Earth-based telescopes,’ Loeb said.
Objects from outside our star system very rarely drift into our cosmic neighbourhood, with 3I/ATLAS being the third recorded drifter.
The first was the asteroid Oumuamua, which passed close to us in 2017. Harvard astronomers similarly suspected it was an alien spaceship.
In 2019, the comet Borisov then paid us a fleeting visit.
31/ATLAS was first spotted by a Nasa-funded telescope in Chile on July 1, with the Minor Planet Center later receiving some 100 sightings.
Experts told Metro that the 7-billion-year-old ‘interstellar interloper’ likely came from the outskirts of the Milky Way.
The Hubble Space Telescope caught its first glimpse of 3I/ATLAS on Monday, showing the comet’s wispy tail, called a coma.
But the comet was unknowingly photographed by Chilean Vera Rubin Observatory in late June, according to a new paper on arXiv.
The analysis, which has not been peer-reviewed, also concluded that the object is a comet.
‘Comet 3I/ATLAS is estimated to have a nucleus of roughly 5.6 kilometres (3.5 miles),’ it said, referring to a comet’s solid core of ices and dust.
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