What a coincidence! The mysterious interstellar object known as 3I/ATLAS has been streaking through the Solar System at exactly the same moment as the U.S. government has shut down. This means that NASA isn’t updating its website, but also that Avi Loeb – a Harvard astrophysicist who has become somewhat notorious for speculating that 3I/ATLAS and other interstellar visitors could be alien probes – can get in some zingers.
From one of Loeb’s latest Medium posts:
In recent days, I was asked by multiple fans about the apparent media blackout surrounding the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS after its Mars flyby on October 3, 2025…. In reply, I explained that NASA is affected by the U.S. government shutdown and large research teams often take days to weeks before they release scientific reports. Long delays are not a signature of extraterrestrial alien intelligence but rather of terrestrial human stupidity.
In the same post, Loeb reviews the many human spacecraft, probes, and instruments that could analyze 3I/ATLAS. Meanwhile, some imagery of the object has come in, and it has spawned predictably wild theories about what is most likely a comet.
It’s a giant spacefaring cylinder!
Believe it or not, a navigation camera mounted on the Mars Perseverance rover apparently captured imagery of 3I/ATLAS as it transited the Martian sky, 38 million kilometers from the red planet. (Perseverance has been up there since 2021.) The resulting image was characterized by some observers online as a streak or stripe. Others, though, interpreted it as a glowing cylinder that’s potentially proof of intelligent alien design, and more fodder for an internet that has seized in Loeb’s comments about 3I/ATLAS’ various anomalies to claim that the object was sent here by them to study us.
Loeb wrote that he was contacted by one of Congress’ most enthusiastic conspiracy theorists, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, about this, and he did the math, explaining what was really going on with the photo:
[T]he stripe in the Navcam image must have resulted from stacking hundreds of Navcam images over a total time interval of about 10 minutes. 3I/ATLAS would have looked like a circular spot for an individual snapshot…. The stacking of hundreds of images enhanced the apparent brightness of 3I/ATLAS in the final image.
A lot of eyes on the prize
Loeb lists more than a dozen orbiters, spectrometers, and Mars-based cameras that could provide images and data of 3I/ATLAS, which was first spotted in July and is just the third interstellar object that we have identified entering the Solar System. (Oumuamua, the previous visitor, was the beginning of Loeb’s theories about these things being alien spacecraft). We should therefore have plenty of data, at some point, and we’ll get another crack at studying 3I/ATLAS as it flies toward Jupiter in November, after which it will exit our galactic neighborhood forever.
Will the government be reopened by next month? Who knows, but its closure has been an interesting wrinkle in the 3I/ATLAS saga. I’m personally surprised that somebody hasn’t loudly declared, “X-Files”-style, that the aliens who secretly control Washington secretly engineered the shutdown so that their buddies could speed through the solar system on the QT while humanity was taking a politically induced break. Oh wait! Somebody sort of has! On the more rational side, however, 3I/ATLAS’ visit has been a great opportunity to see how science is really done. Loeb and his colleagues have really been showing their work, and we’re all better informed because of it.
