This is one of many articles where this guy who teaches astrophysics at Harvard of all places keeps claiming interstellar objects are alien spacecraft despite the overwhelming majority of opinion of the astronomy community:
Has anyone called this guy out for the bullshitter he clearly is?
How does Avi Loeb continue to teach at Harvard?
byu/WWDB inspace
26 Comments
He has tenure. the system isn’t perfect, but it’s better than a lot of alternatives.
My friends keep falling for this stuff, too. I always hear “Harvard professor discovers alien technology” or some crap like that and it keeps coming back to that guy.
Dr. Angela Collier has:
[harvard & aliens & crackpots: a disambiguation of Avi Loeb](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI)
Nothing in that article shows he should not be teaching. He is quoted in the article as saying it is most likely natural. Scientists are allowed to have fun a spit ball hypothetically, nothing he is saying about it being a aloen probe/ship is impossible, just highly improbable.
I’ve always assumed that he still has a job because he went off the deep end after he got tenure and he isn’t in violation of his tenure contract.
Tenure. He has that job as long as he wants it. Pushing fringe theories is not a reason for removing tenure, in fact one could say that it is the very purpose of the tenure system. He gained tenure in the 90s and wasn’t so outspoken with his beliefs at the time, from what I can tell.
I believe you should examine the way you’re thinking about this. Should scientists exclusively follow the “majority” opinion? Should he lose his teaching post for entertaining novel or niche ideas? This is as anti-science as it gets. He’s tenured, let him work.
I’ve spent enough time in academia to learn this fact: *All* c*razy geniuses are zealots. Learn their beliefs.*
That doesn’t mean you should adopt them. And some of those crackpots are quite useful for very unintuitive problems (myself included). They stick around because they manage to get the university money (who knows, maybe one of the Trustees subscribes to the same insanity?).
Loeb is a real scientist who has done real science. His aliens stuff is, in my opinion, attention seeking and embarrassing and his publication tactics are somewhat suspect. His politics are also objectionable to me. All that said, nothing he’s done really disqualifies him from continuing to teach and do research. Harvard might feel a little bit put out by his public persona, but nothing he’s done would get him fired.
First of all, it may be better to refer to his medium blog than the Daily Mail, which is cherry picking.
Second, history is littered with those who thought that they knew everything and dismissed alternative ideas as nonsense.
Famously, Einstein hated the probability nature of Quantum Physics, leading to his quote on dice, and yet, he was utterly wrong (As brilliant as he was).
If you value the ability to think clear headed, and consider scientifically proven ideas, however uncomfortable they may be for your biases, perhaps you should consider the reality of the evidence in the following papers:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-21620-3
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377077692_Extraterrestrial_Life_in_Space_Plasmas_in_the_Thermosphere_UAP_Pre-Life_Fourth_State_of_Matter
“Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.” – Pierre Pachet (1872)
Tbf he almost always indicates it’s unlikely to be aliens but it can’t be ruled out. Media & wackos on social media just run with that bit leaving out the rest. He does enjoy the resulting attention tho lol
If you actually read his articles you would see he doesn’t say that. He says it’s possible, but most likely prosaic in nature.
Because he is a serious scientist. When we observe objects in space that are unusual and unexpected, he wants to know more. I don’t believe he ever actually says it’s aliens. But he is open to those possibilities and wants to gather more evidence when there is uncertainty. I have no idea why that upsets people.
Have you listened to him speak or read his blog? Perhaps avoiding the click bait articles from the Daily Mail also
From what I have seen of him and the “might be aliens” stuff, when you actually get to the crux of what he is suggesting it isn’t him saying “it’s aliens”, it’s mostly him saying “it is more than likely a natural event, but what if/it could be alien probe/tech?”
It is often more of a thought experiment, but also is justified by him and the others who publish with him as a combination thought experiment and as preparation for what he considers the inevitable time when we have actual proof of alien intelligence, and how society and the population is going to have to adjust based on that evidence.
To be fair… if you are paying attention, every thing he says to the “popular press” about extra solar objects can be summed up as “the probability of them being alien technology is low, but not zero.” He is spouting wild ideas, but I believe his point, is to keep an open mind so that you don’t miss the real Aliens if they ever DO show up.
He has never outright claimed that any interstellar object is alien. The headlines you saw are clickbait. And as others have mentioned, he is one of the few that are willing to think outside the box among his peers. Historically, this is where scientific breakthroughs happen.
You’re complaining about the Daily Mail. It’s clickbait.
If you read his actual newsletter, he’s consistently and durably clear in distinguishing speculation from fact, and assigning probalities, and doing so according to transparent and public metrics which indeed he is attempting to get traction with.
The question he’s asking aren’t wrong, or click bait.
Astronomer here! I was at Harvard until last year and interacted with Avi many times. As others have noted, he has tenure. That means he has the academic freedom to pursue whatever weird ideas he wants (and he has also brought Harvard several million dollars of private money in pursuing it so they sure aren’t TOO upset over it). Also worth noting the Harvard press office has long ago stopped promoting anything he does- he and his students are the ones reaching out regularly to reporters.
I was also there when he got public flack for attacking Jill Tarter publicly, to the point where he sent a public apology to the institute mailing list (which was a “I apologized for how she took it” kind of apology but whatever). As was pointed out to me at the time, he has the right as a university employee to keep whatever HR entanglements he may or may not have private.
Finally it is worth noting that dude is legit a good theorist before the aliens stuff consumed him, working on many different topics in astrophysics, and is very intelligent. I do feel sorry for those who collaborated with him earlier tho- my friend who did an important paper that was just “Friend and Loeb” said he had to stop talking about that paper recently in his talks because everyone saw Loeb and just wanted to ask about the aliens stuff…
Loeb’s wildest claims are always presented as tangential possibilities within his papers that are about things that aren’t aliens. Reviewers should be requesting omissions on those parts, so it’s really not just his own failure to include them.
Even so, his claims are tame in comparison to other mainstream scientists of twenty years ago. Tom Van Flandern is a good example, making his career of solving time dilation issues on the first iteration of GPS satellites, working on orbital mechanics, etc. Only later to argue that the Face on Mars was real and NASA was covering up a civilization on Mars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Van_Flandern
https://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/
Maybe I’m missing something
But why exactly is questioning whether something’s alien or not a bad thing? However unlikely it may be, is it not worth asking that question?
If anything, I would figure the attention he’s getting to be a good thing. We need people to care about science and more people are talking about 3I/Atlas than they otherwise would have.
3I/Atlas has genuine anomalies and Loeb is doing genuine science.
Give Me Avi Loeb’s Job, You Cowards | by Seven Rasmussen | https://kaitlinrasmussen.medium.com/give-me-avi-loebs-job-you-cowards-4c9a3f5256eb
I once like many of you here, thought he was just attention seeking. But then I checked his profile and was shocked. He is a research group director and former head of school. He has an H index over 100, decades of experience and close to his retirement age. He is already highly achieving and has no need to grab any attention. Saying the 3i may be alien could cost him way more than he could gain.
Also If it is about science then let’s argue with evidence like observations, calculations etc, not out of the thin air because you want everything natural but not alien. If you check his papers you will see all the abnormalities detailed. I don’t see many major issues with his analysis.
It is statistically possible that a comet would have one or two abnormalities he described, but not 7 to 8! The combined probability is very low. He is simply arguing that we should be prepared for any black swan event with high impact. This is about survival. You would rather be prepared and he is wrong, but not we caught off guard and got extinct because we don’t want him to be right.
Professor Dave cooked this fraud in a video recently.
In all of his long form writing about the topic he states clearly that he believes it is almost certainly an interesting natural object and unlikely to be alien technology, and that thinking about the alien hypothesis is a pedagogical exercise. I think that is probably a worthwhile exercise for young scientists in training; learning how to think about and study novel/unusual phenomena and balance open-mindedness with good science.
For example:
>**As largely a pedagogical exercise**, in this paper we present additional analysis into the astrodynamics of 3I/ATLAS, and hypothesize that this object could be technological, and possibly hostile as would be expected from the ‘Dark Forest’ resolution to the ‘Fermi Paradox’.
Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology? https://share.google/Ub65TGwrTgXQaYQgk
>As of now, 3I/ATLAS appears most likely to be a natural comet.
The Imminent Solar Conjunction of 3I/ATLAS | by Avi Loeb | Oct, 2025 | Medium https://share.google/Eal4K5jM9RP0M1EtR
In “pop media” or whatever you want to call it, the alien angle is all people want to talk about, so he plays it up in those contexts. Anyone interested enough to look past the sound bites and clickbait would quickly realize he’s having fun with it.
I feel like he has a team of interns working for him that constantly keep writing clickbait fluff articles that link to his blog. The dude is basically just an influencer at this point.