Imagine noticing a new animal in your backyard with a tail coming out of its forehead instead of its rear end. After looking at its image, experts argue that it must be a cat because cats have a tail. You point out that cats do not have an anti-tail but the experts dismiss the anomaly and keep telling reporters that any street animal with a tail must be a cat. You also calculate that the animal is at least a thousand times more massive than the only street cat that was previously identified in your backyard, but experts dismiss the anomaly and argue that some cats might be much bigger than others. You also realize that the animal moves along a rare path targeting specific assets near your house, and sheds materials with a composition of industrially-made nickel alloys, but experts ignore these inconvenient facts and claim that rare things happen all the time. While you keep your focus on the animal, zealot influencers, bloggers and science popularizers say loudly that considering anything other than a cat is harmful to science and dangerous to society, because we all know that street cats are common. You write multiple reports about the various anomalies of this animal, suggesting to keep an open mind about its nature. The editor handling your report on the anomalous mass of this animal scrutinizes the wording you use and requests that you will describe the animal as an unusually massive cat and not speculate on alternatives. The same editor goes public and makes negative personal remarks about you, and his boss explains that there is nothing unethical about this behavior. When you write another paper to explain the properties of the anti-tail coming from the head of the animal based on known physics, a different editor declines to process the manuscript for review by arguing: “I believe that your results would be of rather limited interest to the research community as a whole.”
If this sounds like a hallucinated nightmare, think twice. To make it real, all you need to do is replace the term `street animal’ with `interstellar object’, `cat’ with `comet’, `backyard’ with the `inner solar system’, `animal’ with `3I/ATLAS’, and the `previous street-cat’ with `2I/Borisov’. An editor did make the quoted statement about the paper I wrote with Eric Keto (accessible here) which is the only paper in the literature providing a physical explanation for the anti-tail observed in the highest resolution image of 3I/ATLAS, taken on July 21, 2025 by the Hubble Space Telescope (accessible here). In addition, 3I/ATLAS followed a fine-tuned path aligned with the ecliptic plane of the planets (as discussed here) and shed nickel without iron (as reported here). The new study that I co-authored on the anomalously high mass of 3I/ATLAS based on the lack of non-gravitational acceleration (accessible here), is still blocked from public view for several days by arXiv moderators without an explanation.
The best way to resolve this saga of self-propagated ignorance about the nature of the `street animal’ in our backyard is to obtain a high-resolution image of it from a surveillance camera close to its path. Indeed, within a week we expect to get an image of 3I/ATLAS with a spatial resolution that is a hundred times better than that of the Hubble image. The HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is expected to achieve a pixel resolution of 30 kilometers on October 3, 2025 when 3I/ATLAS will be at a distance of 29 million kilometers from it. The amount of sunlight reflected from the brightest pixel in the HiRISE image will inform us of the nucleus surface area for an assumed albedo value.
The first recognized interstellar object, 1I/`Oumuamua, did not show any evidence for a tail. Comet experts insist that this `animal’ is `a cat with an invisible tail’, namely a `dark comet’ (as discussed here). That an `animal without a tail’ is labeled a `dark cat’ by mainstream scientists illustrates how dogmatic is the culture of present-day academia. Within this culture, anomalies are ignored, attempts to explain them using known physics are sidelined and scientists who dare to challenge traditional thinking are ridiculed on social media.
The most pressing question about the nature of 3I/ATLAS is whether it is natural or technological in origin. Secondary to this question is where it came from. As of now, we do not know. The five anomalies of 3I/ATLAS, including its anomalously polarized light (as reported here), suggest that we are missing something, but dogmatists insist that there is nothing fundamentally new to be learned. With that mindset, challenging evidence is not studied in sufficient detail and the opportunity to learn something new is missed because of unwarranted orthodoxy.
The self-imposed ignorance inflicted by the refusal to be open minded is easy to correct. We must reward scientists who challenge orthodoxy and focus attention on anomalies. Instead of insisting that all `street-animals’ in our backyard are `cats’, we must study agnostically the visitors who appear unusually massive, move on rare fine-tuned trajectories, show strange tails and shed unusual chemicals. Such a research focus will allow us to learn something new about our cosmic neighborhood and provide the practical benefit of protecting our family from existential threats.
Non-avian dinosaurs failed to recognize the existential threat from asteroids. 66-million years later, humans actively search for killer asteroids but fail to recognize the existential threat from alien technology. Future wars tend to be different from past wars. Will earthlings ever learn how to defend themselves against the next major threat?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
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