Scientist shares 'what NASA should have told us' about 'alien mothership' 3I/ATLAS in press conference

A Harvard professor has weighed in on the 3I/ATLAS debate, sharing 'what NASA should have emphasized' about the suspected alien mothership . NASA boffins held a press conference on Wednesday, quashing speculation that the interstellar object hurtling through our solar system is a spacecraft and confirming that it is a comet. However, physicist Avi Loeb is convinced 3I/ATLAS could still be a spacecraft and says NASA haven't told us the full story. The Harvard professor has vowed to analyse pictures over the coming days to determiner whether it could be a threat to Earth. He said: "NASA’s representatives should have emphasized what we do not understand about 3I/ATLAS rather than insist that it is a familiar comet from a new birth environment. "They stated that 3I/ATLAS does what comets do, namely shed gas and dust and responds to gravity. But a spacecraft that collected dust and CO2, CO & H2O ices on its surface by traveling through the cold interstellar medium could have also developed an outer layer of dust mixed with ices that sublimate when illuminated by sunlight. "We should not 'judge a book by its cover', because we all know about the Trojan Horse which appeared unthreatening to the guardians of the City of Troy. When monitoring an interstellar visitor, we should not fall prey to traditional thinking but scrutinize new interpretations." Professor Loeb, the Baird Professor of Science and Institute director at Harvard University, pointed again to anomalies which suggest 3I/ATLAS, including its mass compared to other interstellar objects, and the behaviour of jets which project from it, which "could reveal fragments from an iceberg that broke up or mini-probes released by a technological mothership". He suggested that, if it is an alien mothership, 3I/ATLAS could be sending probes to Mars and Earth as it visits our solar system. He said we could know by Christmas whether it is a spaceship, and advised alien watchers to note December 19 in their calendars, as that is the date when 3I/ATLAS will pass closest to Earth. "We should know the answer by the time 3I/ATLAS is closest to Earth on December 19, 2025, a gift of new interstellar knowledge for the holidays," he posted on his website . "Life is worth living if we allow for the unexpected to surprise us. Bureaucrats or unimaginative scientists want us to believe in the expected. But the rest of us know that the best is yet to come." Earlier on Wednesday, Dr. Tom Statler, the lead scientist for solar system small bodies with NASA, said 3I/ATLAS may have come from "a very old solar system", while Elon Musk also joined the debate . Dr Statler said: "Quite possibly, we can’t say this for sure, but the likelihood is that it came from a solar system older than our own solar system itself, which gives me goosebumps to think about frankly, because that means that 3I/ATLAS is not just a window into another solar system, it’s a window into the deep past – and so deep into the past that it predates even the formation of our earth and the sun," he said. For the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletters .