We might have been visited by aliens says Harvard astronomer when a cigar-shaped object flew past Earth in 2017. And we might not have even realized it.
Dr. Abraham Loeb, the author of a new book called Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, says that astronomers were too quick to label the peculiar asteroid as something natural rather than investigating it further. “Most of the mainstream astronomy community ignored 'Oumuamua's anomalies," Dr. Loeb said, rather than really investigating it. Oumuamua, the first confirmed object from another star to visit our solar system, was discovered on Oct. 19, 2017, by the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope on the island of Maui. The telescope is equipped with the world's largest digital camera. “Some scientists find my hypothesis unfashionable, outside of mainstream science, even dangerously ill-conceived,” writes the Harvard astrophysicist in his new book. “But the most egregious error we can make, I believe, is not to take this possibility seriously enough.” Loeb, director of Harvard’s Institute for Theory and Computation, and founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative thinks the visitor was more than just an “interstellar object,” which it is currently dubbed, but rather a byproduct of intelligent life outside our solar system.
