Harvard Astronomer Who Claims Space Object May Be Alien Probe Says Critics Have ‘Head in the Sand’

This artist’s impression shows the first interstellar asteroid: `Oumuamua. This unique object was discovered on Oct. 19, 2017, by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawai`i. Subsequent observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and other observatories around the world show that it was travelling through space for millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system. European Southern Observatory/M. Kornmesser

Harvard University Astronomy Department chair Avi Loeb is pushing back against peer criticism of his hypothesis that a strange object—the Oumuamua—found in the solar system might be an alien probe.

“As became apparent from the reaction of some scientists to my publications on the subject, many of them assign a prior probability of zero to the possibility that we will find evidence for alien civilizations,” Loeb wrote in a Reddit “ask me anything” or AMA discussion he initiated on Feb. 2, adding, “this resembles an ostrich placing its head in the sand.”