Major 3I/ATLAS replace as mysterious sign ‘may very well be message from alien’s house planet’
A Harvard scientist tracking 3I/ATLAS, a bizarre interstellar visitor to our solar system, believes its home planet may have sent the ‘Wow!’ signal that has baffled boffins for decades
Theoretical physicist Avi Loeb has linked 31/ATLAS, the strange object set to hurtle near Earth next month, to a mystery that has puzzled scientists for almost 50 years – the ‘Wow!’ signal received in 1977.
Loeb, who fears the interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS could be a spaceship, believes the mysterious 72-second radio signal might have been sent to the alien craft from its home planet.
“That’s possible,” he told a TV station. “That may be why the Wow! Signal was nine degrees away from the arrival direction of 3I/ATLAS, or 3I/ATLAS started in a slightly different direction than we saw it, explaining the offset.”
The astrophysicist has already highlighted plenty of weird aspects of 31/ATLAS that could suggest it’s a spaceship not a comet. 3I/ATLAS was first spotted by the ATLAS telescope system on 1 July 2025.
It was classed as “interstellar” because its trajectory showed that it’s not gravitationally bound to our own solar system. But the Manhattan-sized object also has incredible speed and might even have used “thrusters“.
The professor has warned “we’re screwed” if it indeed comes from a more technologically advanced civilisation. 3I/ATLAS, he says, could represent a “black swan event” that’s unpredictable but globally significant.
The interstellar comet – or spacecraft – will come closest to the earth on December 19 after passing the sun on October 30. But it won’t come closer to us than 130 million miles.
The Wow! radio signal has long puzzled experts. Ohio State University’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project in 1977 recorded the 72-second radio burst in 1977.
Astronomer Jerry Ehman was so astonished that he scribbled “Wow!” on the computer printout. The signal has been seen as one of the clearest signs of alien life, although a study from the University of Puerto Rico recently suggested the origin might be an exploding star.
Loeb, though, is open to an alien origin and a link with our current mysterious visitor. “The Wow! signal was at the distance of three light days, about 600 times the Earth-Sun separation, and back then it needed the power of a nuclear plant in order to transmit the Wow! Signal, about a gigawatt,” he said.
“So that’s feasible.” He admits, though, that we don’t have enough data to know whether the object is really phoning home.
“But it may well be that the Wow! Signal has nothing to do with 3I/ATLAS,” he said. “We don’t know, we just need to keep our eyes on the ball.”
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