Pod Insights Conspiracy Theories Is An Alien Probe Really Coming in November? About this episode In July 2025, researchers discovered an interstellar object entering our solar system. It’s only the third we’ve detected – ever – and it’s been dubbed Comet 3I/ATLAS. NASA says it does not pose a threat to us.
But one Harvard scientist suggests 3I/ATLAS isn’t necessarily a comet – there are too many anomalies. He says, this object may not be natural…it might be alien technology.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 In the late summer of 1977, NASA launched two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. The probes were sent to study Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons. After that, they just kept going, sending back tens of thousands of photographs along the way. They also carried something with them, something called "The Golden Record." It's an actual 12-inch phonograph record containing a collection of images and audio recordings, from nature sounds to classical music. It also holds greetings in 55 spoken languages. Because The Golden Record is meant to be a message.
0:44 Speaker 00 See, nobody knew how far the Voyager probes would go, or how long they would last, but they are still going and reporting back to us. Voyager 1 is over 15 and a half billion miles from Earth. They're both out in interstellar space, beyond our solar system, farther than any object made by humans. So scientists accounted for this possibility, that one day, maybe millions of years in the future, some other life form in the Milky Way Galaxy will find them and discover The Golden Record.
1:22 Speaker 00 But, what if we're not the only ones in the history of the universe who've had this idea? What if other intelligent life out there has sent their own version of the Voyagers? According to one Harvard scientist, an alien probe might be visiting our solar system right now. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. You can watch our episodes and more on our new YouTube channel, @conspiracietheoriespodcast,
2:05 Speaker 00 and check us out on Instagram, @theconspiracypod. And we would love to hear from you, so if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and please, give us your thoughts. Stay with us.
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4:14 Speaker 00 On July 1st, 2025, a telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile scans the sky above. It's part of a NASA-funded project called ATLAS, which stands for Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System. And it's one of four telescopes monitoring for asteroids that might be headed toward Earth. But tonight, it finds something different. An object moving through deep space at 130,000 miles per hour. It's later named Comet 3I ATLAS, the third object ever detected in our solar system that came from beyond. And that's how it gets its name: 3I ATLAS.
4:57 Speaker 00 The "I" stands for interstellar, meaning it originated from outside of our solar system. "Three" because it's the third, after Oumuamua in 2017, and 2I Boraosoff in 2019. And "ATLAS" as a nod to the team who discovered it. That leaves just the first part of its name: comet. That's how it was classified by the Minor Planet Center, the organization responsible for making, well, exactly this type of identification. You probably have a good idea of what a comet is: an icy celestial object made of dust, rock, and frozen gases.
5:38 Speaker 00 Most comets we know about, which come from within our solar system, orbit the Sun. But 3I ATLAS is on a different orbital path. It's not bound by our Sun's gravity. It's going so fast, it can fly past the Sun, shoot out of our solar system, and keep going. And depending on who you ask, it might not even be a comet. It could be alien technology. That possibility was proposed by Dr. Abraham Avi Loeb, and he has official titles for days. Buckle up, here we go. He's the Frank B. Baird Junior Professor of Science at Harvard.
6:22 Speaker 00 He served as the Chair of Harvard's Astronomy Department for nine years, and he's the Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
6:35 Speaker 00 Okay, so he's not just some random guy down the street who thinks raccoons are trying to steal his garbage. When news breaks that Three Eye Atlas has been detected, Loeb keeps his eye on it. Well, I mean, a lot of scientists do, it's an exciting time. And Loeb starts to notice a few anomalies. For example, the object's brightness. In these early days of tracking Three Eye Atlas, it seems to be reflecting a lot of light for a comet. By Loeb's calculations, that means it could be as big as 20 kilometers in size. That's over 12.4 miles long, incredibly large for an interstellar rock. According to Loeb, we should only expect to see an interstellar object that big once
7:20 Speaker 00 every 10,000 years or so. And again, this is only the third one we've gotten a look at in the past few years, ever since our technology allowed us to start spotting them. Okay, here's another strange detail: the path Three Eye Atlas is following. The orbit can tell us a lot: where it came from, which is how scientists knew that it was interstellar, and where it's going. The trajectory of Three Eye Atlas will be taking it relatively close to Mars, Jupiter, and Venus. It's flying by three of our eight planets in just one trip.
7:58 Speaker 00 Loeb finds the chances of that happening randomly are low: about .0005 percent. That's a lot of zeros and not much else. And there's yet another anomaly. Loeb isn't seeing enough evidence that Three Eye Atlas has a trail of dust, or what we'd call a cometary tail, which you'd expect to see with a comet. So, if it's not a comet, what could it be?
8:30 Speaker 00 Well, that same July, Loeb releases a paper he co-authored titled, "Is the interstellar object 3I Atlas Alien Technology?" You heard me right, as in, something built by an alien species that they launched into space. If it is alien technology, he argues, that could explain these anomalies. An artificial object could give off its own light, it could be larger than your average comet, and it could set its own course, flying close enough to certain planets to get a good look. Now, Loeb concludes his paper by essentially saying,
9:14 Speaker 00 "This thing might be a comet and not something sent by aliens." He adds, "This is, quote, 'the most likely outcome,'" and says some of his ideas are like a thought experiment. But that doesn't mean we can't ask questions. We should. On his blog, Loeb writes, "Science is fun. It offers an opportunity to learn something new, as long as we do not pretend to expect the unexpected." In other words, don't assume anything. Now, in early August, NASA releases a new image of 3I Atlas. It was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope the previous month,
9:58 Speaker 00 and it offers the clearest image seen yet, from 277 million miles away. NASA reports that the photo shows a, quote, "teardrop-shaped cocoon of dust coming off its solid icy nucleus." Based off the new image, they believe 3I Atlas could be a lot smaller than originally thought. Rather than a 20-kilometer behemoth, they suggest it's probably no more than 5.6 kilometers across.
10:33 Speaker 00 Okay, by now, a lot of news outlets and experts are referring to the object as a comet. But Loeb holds out. Shortly after the Hubble images are released, he says, “We still can’t definitively say that’s what this thing is, not without more proof of a tail, not without a good theory or explanation for those other anomalies he’s pointed out: the brightness and the path it’s taking past those planets.” As 3I Atlas nears Earth, new information comes out every few days. For example, we learned it has a really high proportion of carbon dioxide compared to other comets.
11:16 Speaker 00 It’s yet another discovery that means this object is so different from the others we’ve studied. We’ll include the latest news about 3I Atlas on our Instagram. However, a lot of experts don’t agree with Loeb’s theory. They’re sure this is a comet, and the fact that we couldn’t see a tail just means that 3I Atlas wasn’t close enough to the Sun yet. See, the tail is affected by things like the Sun’s heat, radiation pressure, and solar winds. Okay, one thing everybody can agree on? We’ve got to keep an eye on 3I Atlas while we can. Once it passes the Earth, it won’t come back,
11:58 Speaker 00 and it will eventually leave our solar system. Loeb has championed this idea that we need to keep as many telescopes as possible trained on 3I Atlas. He suggests we should use the Juno spacecraft, which is orbiting Jupiter, to capture images when it passes by in March of 2026. Because even if 3I Atlas is just an interstellar comet, we still have a lot to learn from it. Usually, we have no way of studying other solar systems up close. But an interstellar comet is essentially bringing another part of the galaxy, well, right to our doorstep. And if it’s not just a comet, if Loeb’s hypothesis turns out to be correct,
12:42 Speaker 00 well, there’s something else we should consider. If 3I Atlas really is some kind of alien technology, intentionally sent on a course to come within 18 million miles of Mars?
12:56 Speaker 00 Could it also change course and head for Earth?
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14:05 Speaker 00 Where were we? What was I talking about? Oh, right, that the theory that an alien probe might be headed for Earth? Yeah, okay. Well, don't freak out just yet. On the current path Three Eye Atlas is following, it's not even getting close. It should remain about 170 million miles away at its nearest point. For perspective, that's 1.8 times farther than our average distance to the Sun. It's a long way away. Still, you might have heard or seen something online, maybe on TikTok or Daily Mail, claiming that an alien probe might arrive here on Earth as early as November 2025, like now.
14:46 Speaker 00 Well, these headlines evolved into a few different theories that we're going to be attacked, that it's not just a probe, but a massive alien mothership, or maybe that the aliens are coming to save us from ourselves.
15:04 Speaker 00 Some say this was even predicted by Baba Vanga, the Nostradamus of Bulgaria. She was a mystic who apparently foretold 9/11 and the death of Princess Diana. She also said 2025 would be the year we make contact with aliens. She didn't say what month, but she did note that it would happen during a major sporting event. Perhaps Football Sunday, the World Series, or the Trampoline World Championships. Put it on your calendar. Now, these theories about 3I Atlas coming to Earth all stem from one place: Avi Loeb's paper.
15:45 Speaker 00 That's the same one we mentioned, the one titled "Is the Interstellar Object 3I Atlas Alien Technology?" Loeb and his co-authors describe how the object could hypothetically get here. They say, "If it is indeed some kind of artificial object, then it can use something called the reverse solar o-birth maneuver to head in our direction." Okay, here's how Loeb proposes that would work. On October 29th or 30th, 3I Atlas will reach its perihelion, the closest point it will get to the Sun. Thank you, team, for helping me learn a new word. Could be good for Scrabble.
16:27 Speaker 00 Right now, it's moving extremely fast, but at perihelion, a probe could use the Sun's gravitational pull plus its own thrusters to slow down, and that would allow it to change its course and head for Earth. Or, he theorizes, maybe 3I Atlas will just release smaller probes and send those to our planet. The kicker? When it reaches perihelion, we're not going to be able to see it from our telescopes on Earth. It's going to be on the other side of the Sun from us. We'll lose sight of it for a while before and after that, which means, well, if you're
17:08 Speaker 00 listening to this episode close to its air date, we cannot currently observe 3I Atlas from here. We don't know if it's actively changing course, or shooting something toward us, or just whizzing on by. And, before you get excited about first contact, there's one part of Loeb's paper I haven't mentioned yet. The part where he brings up the Dark Forest hypothesis. Well, you might remember we talked about the Dark Forest hypothesis in our episode, "Where Are All The Aliens?" If it sounds a little sinister, that's because it kind of is.
17:49 Speaker 00 The Dark Forest hypothesis suggests the reason we haven't made contact with other intelligent life in the universe, or found evidence of older alien civilizations, is because they've been lying low. They are out there, but they're in hiding, because they know there's a good chance that making contact with their interstellar neighbors could spell disaster. Any alien life form could be hostile.
18:18 Speaker 00 So goes this hypothesis, anyway. But the fact that Loeb's paper mentions it seems to suggest 3-I Atlas could be a threat. And us Earthlings better hope it's not the case. I mean, in addition to the Voyager probes, we've sent out three others that are on their way out of our solar system: Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and New Horizons. Plus, we've been beaming radio transmissions into space for over 50 years. If an advanced civilization out there wanted to find us and kill us,
18:55 Speaker 00 we've left them a few trails of breadcrumbs. Now, luckily for us, experts don't think this Dark Forest hypothesis is the most likely scenario. They think it would be too hard for so many advanced societies to stay totally hidden. Okay, suffice it to say, Loeb's paper, the Dark Forest alien probe, it might not be a comet paper. It's been met with a good deal of controversy. One Oxford astronomer said, quote, "Any suggestion that it's artificial is nonsense on stilts and is an insult to the exciting work going on to understand this object." And to be clear, NASA has stated from the outset, "Comet 3-I Atlas poses no threat
19:40 Speaker 00 to Earth and will remain far away." So, as far as prominent scientists with Harvard pedigrees go, Loeb is out there on a limb.
19:51 Speaker 00 It doesn't seem to deter him, though. Well, after all, he's no stranger to controversy. Like when he asked similar questions about Oumuamua, the first interstellar object we ever detected. Okay, we're jumping back a few years now to October 2017. That's when the PanStars One Telescope caught sight of it, the first confirmed visitor from another solar system. According to NASA, the Hawaiian name "Oumuamua" translates to "a messenger from afar arriving first." Good name. Like Three Eye Atlas, it was initially classified as a comet.
20:36 Speaker 00 But not everyone was on the same page. Others thought it could be an asteroid, made up of mostly rock, rather than ice and dust. They could tell it had a really unique shape. At first, it was described as elongated and thin, like a cigar. Later studies found it might look more like a pancake, round and flat. By the way, the shape wasn't typical of the comets we're used to. Plus, Oumuamua had no visible cometary tail. Sound familiar? And its brightness raised questions, too. Get this. Every 7.3 hours, the brightness would change by a factor of 10,
21:20 Speaker 00 almost like it was blinking. When I heard that, I was like, "Whoa, wait a minute, timeout. I need to hear more." Well, experts realized it was tumbling end over end, and that affected how much light it reflected back at us. It was a logical explanation, but still unusual for a comet.
21:43 Speaker 00 Then there was this fact. Scientists observed Oumuamua accelerating in unexpected ways, seemingly at random. Okay, I didn't know this before. Comets can accelerate due to outgassing. That's normal. That's what happens when they heat up and start to release their gases. But with Oumuamua, we couldn't see its coma, the fuzzy cloudy atmosphere that's usually surrounding a comet, which is made by outgassing. So we couldn't see the proof of why it was making those random movements. The official conclusion? We don't need to see proof. If it moves like a comet, then it's gotta be a comet.
22:27 Speaker 00 We probably just can't see the outgassing with our current telescopes. Avi Loeb wasn't so ready to agree with that conclusion. He wrote a paper suggesting we should consider, quote, "the possibility of an artificial origin." It was later published in the peer-reviewed journal Astrobiology in 2022. So, years before Three Eye Atlas came along, Loeb was making the same case, generally speaking, about Oumuamua, that it could be made by extraterrestrials. Specifically, he theorized it could be some kind of large, flat light sail, a type of spacecraft that can propel itself using sunlight.
23:12 Speaker 00 He argued we should at least be considering the possibility, since Oumuamua was so unique. And he added this anecdote. "The same Panstars One telescope that discovered Oumuamua had in 2020 detected another mysterious object orbiting near the Earth. It was dubbed 2020 SO." Loeb said it was similar to Oumuamua, and that it showed no outgassing. But this case had an interesting outcome, and that's what Loeb was focused on. Eventually, experts realized that 2020 SO was artificial. It just wasn't made by aliens. It was made by humans. It was space junk.
23:56 Speaker 00 Oops, took out the garbage. Turns out, it was actually a broken-off rocket booster from NASA's Surveyor 2 mission in 1966. It was designed to land on the moon and take lunar data in preparation for the Apollo missions. But Surveyor 2 crash-landed, and 54 years later, we found one of its rocket boosters orbiting the Earth. If 2020 SO wound up being artificial, couldn't Oumuamua have been too? Okay, well, one major difference was that Oumuamua was far away, and we could only track its movements back so far.
24:38 Speaker 00 In this case, a definitive answer wasn't in the cards. Although in 2021, a new study suggested it was likely a chunk of a planet, similar to our Pluto, from another solar system. But Oumuamua has long since passed us by, and we won't be seeing it again. We'll never have tangible proof, one way or another. Bye-bye, Oumuamua. That's the thing about studying objects moving tens of thousands of miles per hour through space. A lot of the time, you just have to trust your calculations, simulations, and telescopes. It's not like we get to hold a mysterious space rock in our hands
25:21 Speaker 00 and know for sure whether it's natural or artificial. Unless it falls to Earth. If Loeb could just get his hands on one of these interstellar objects and study it in a lab, maybe he could find out, once and for all, if it's a rock or some kind of technology. Well, that's exactly what Loeb says he may have done.
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26:52 Speaker 00 Okay, let's jump in our time machines and head back in time again to January 8th, 2014. A fireball blazed across the sky above the South Pacific, somewhere near the northern coast of Papua New Guinea. It flew by at over 60 kilometers per second. That's 134,000 miles per hour, fast enough to cause shock waves as the asteroid entered our atmosphere. Then it broke apart. Its fragments fell to the Earth, making it by definition a meteorite. So now hopefully we know the difference between a meteorite, an asteroid and a comet. The event was detected by a US Department of Defense satellite. After that, the meteorite was recorded in a public database
27:37 Speaker 00 produced by NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies, or CENEOS. It was simply called CENEOS 2014-0108, referring to the date the meteorite was discovered. Not the most original naming system. Its arrival didn't make global news. There was no video shared across social media. It's possible nobody saw it happen. Or they did, but it just looked like any other shooting star. And that might have been the end of this meteorite story, until Avi Loeb and a small team found it listed in that database five years later in 2019. Because on paper, it looked exactly like what they were searching for.
28:22 Speaker 00 An old interstellar object that our telescopes had missed. Remember, Oumuamua was just the first one we detected. That doesn't mean there weren't other interstellar objects that came before. We just didn't always have the technology to see them. So if you're a scientist, you could wait until we find the next one, or you could look at data from past objects, like the 2014 meteorite that had broken up over Papua New Guinea. What caught the team's eye was the meteorite's speed. Something going that fast could have come from outside our solar system.
29:04 Speaker 00 Loeb and his colleague wrote a paper on these findings and submitted it for publication. Only the astronomy journal they submitted to initially rejected it. More data was needed to back up these claims, they said. But there was a problem. Some of that data, recorded by the Department of Defense, was technically classified. Now, if you're like me, you might be wondering why satellite data about a meteorite would be classified? Well, according to the BBC, it's because the documents Loeb needed to prove his data, quote, "would reveal too much about the capabilities of the military equipment that found it."
29:48 Speaker 00 See, the satellite monitored by the US Department of Defense was built to keep an eye out for foreign missiles. It was a spy satellite. In 2022, Loeb actually got confirmation for his theory from the government. In a memo to NASA, a US Space Force Lieutenant General wrote that his chief scientist reviewed Loeb's data, the part that was classified. He found it to be accurate, and he thought there was a high probability that Loeb was right. The meteorite was interstellar. As a result, Ceneo's 2014-0108 was given the much snappier name IM1.
30:38 Speaker 00 The first interstellar meteorite, which meant it had fallen to Earth, and if Loeb could find the pieces, he and his colleagues could actually study them in the lab and maybe even prove their origin.
30:54 Speaker 00 Except, well, he just had to retrieve them from the bottom of the sea. Loeb had the coordinates of where IM1 presumably broke up. He knew he wanted to look about 60 miles off the coast of Manus Island, where the water is about a mile deep. In June 2023, he got his chance. He headed up an expedition aboard a ship called Silver Star. The team took a sled outfitted with magnets, lowered it to the seafloor, and dragged it along as they sailed. In the end, it picked up 850 metallic particles, which Loeb calls spherules.
31:39 Speaker 00 They're these tiny molten metal droplets he believes came from the meteorite. In a lab back at Harvard, the team figured out what elements the spherules were made of. The vast majority had compositions you'd expect to find in our solar system, if you know about that kind of thing. But 10% of the spherules were different. They contained high concentrations of certain elements like uranium and beryllium. These are elements we do find naturally on Earth, but Loeb said these showed concentrations 1,000 times higher than we'd find in objects from our solar system, which seemed to confirm
32:20 Speaker 00 that this meteorite wasn't from our neck of the woods. He also suggested another theory. And you might know where I'm going with this, that IM1 wasn't just a space rock. It could have an artificial origin. It could have been some kind of alien technology. Whatever IM1 was, it burned up in our atmosphere on its way down. Loeb likens it to a laptop melted in a fire. It's not going to look like a laptop anymore. So, he hopes to return to the site near Papua New Guinea and continue searching for larger pieces.
33:01 Speaker 00 Like Loeb's other theories and claims, his conclusions about IM1 have been challenged. Starting with the fact that some experts don't believe the meteorite really was interstellar. Let's look at its trajectory, for example. It's a big reason why Loeb suspected right away that the meteorite wasn't from our solar system. Now, we can use an object's trajectory to trace the direction it came from, and Loeb got that data from those classified military satellites. So detractors say we don't know how reliable that data is. As one of NASA's planetary scientists told the BBC, "If the satellite's sensors were built for a totally different purpose,
33:44 Speaker 00 like spying on foreign missiles and nuclear explosions, they might not be the most accurate way to get data on meteorites." Others say Loeb might have been looking for those meteorite fragments in the wrong place, and therefore the spherials aren't even from IM1. Back when he was zeroing in on a search area, he started with the satellite data from the US Department of Defense. Then to narrow it down even more, he looked at a seismometer on Manus Island. It measures vibrations, like when there's an earthquake. The seismometer did record vibrations right around the time the meteorite broke up. But another scientist looked at that same seismic data and saw something different.
34:29 Speaker 00 To him, it looked like there was just a big truck driving by. Loeb responded. He said he relied primarily on the satellite data, not the seismometer, and he remains positive he was looking in the right location.
34:48 Speaker 00 More questions were raised about whether the spherules were from this particular meteorite, IM1. Were there enough controls? Did they get samples from a nearby area to compare? Could they have come from another meteorite a long time ago? Okay, so the point being, Loeb has gotten considerable pushback. In addition to being introduced as a Harvard scientist, he is just as often called "controversial." Some go so far as to say his theories are "damaging to the entire field of astrobiology." But Loeb seems to take all of that criticism in stride. He hopes all of this work will
35:31 Speaker 00 inspire children to study science. And he says, "It's arrogant to assume we're alone in the universe, or that we're special." He brings up historical figures who were vilified by those who didn't understand them, like Giordano Bruno. He was burned at the stake in 1600, in part because he believed the stars in the sky were other suns, like ours, and that they also had their own planets, a fact we know today to be true. Then, of course, there's Galileo Galilei. He was one of the first to use a telescope, and since he was an astronomer, he turned his lens towards space. He was the first
36:16 Speaker 00 to note that the moon was covered in craters, not smooth. He discovered four of Jupiter's moons, and he found evidence to support Copernicus's theory that the Earth and other planets orbited the Sun, a fact we know today to be true. But it went against the Catholic Church at the time. They promoted the idea that everything in space revolved around "us." Galileo wasn't burned at the stake, but he was placed on house arrest for the last nine years of his life. Now, he's the namesake of Loeb's Galileo Project. It aims to change how the public feels about research into extraterrestrials. Because regardless of
37:00 Speaker 00 your views on Loeb, there is a stigma attached to the pursuit of proof that aliens exist.
37:08 Speaker 00 I find it fascinating because a lot of science accepts that we don't know what's out there and there's a very high likelihood of some sort of life in the universe, which means, well, eventually, we might find it. So maybe we should be open to looking for it. When we launched the Voyager probes back in 1977, one item on the golden record was a message from President Jimmy Carter. He wrote, "We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. If that message is ever intercepted and decoded, it might be read by a distant civilization millions of years in the future. The content of that
37:50 Speaker 00 golden record will be lasting proof that humans existed on Earth." But will the aliens believe what they've found? Thank you for watching Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. And if you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. For more information, check out Avi Loeb's blog on Medium, where he's covering this story practically on a daily basis. Until next time, remember,
38:31 Speaker 00 the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written and researched by Mickey Taylor, edited by Maggie Admire and Pete Ritchie, fact-checked by Sophie Kemp, and engineered, video-edited, and sound-designed by Alex Button. I'm your host, Carter Roy.
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