Scientists who said 3I/ATLAS could be a huge alien ship headed to Earth by November just thought it would be ‘fun’ to pretend
The summer of 2025 delivered plenty of strange headlines, but few spread faster online than the claim that Earth had only a few months before a giant alien ship arrived. The supposed culprit was 3I/ATLAS, an interstellar object spotted on July 1. Instagram posts called it “most likely” an alien craft. TikTok videos treated it as a looming space invasion. On X, one post suggesting hostile extraterrestrials had already fired up their engines racked up more than a million views.
The truth, however, was far less cinematic.
NASA and the European Space Agency identified 3I/ATLAS as an interstellar comet, not a cosmic battle cruiser
“Interstellar” simply means it came from outside our solar system, not outside the galaxy as some viral posts claimed. Intergalactic travel is a whole other scale, and this object wasn’t it.
So where did the alien ship rumors start?
The spark came from a paper titled “Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?” by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and two British researchers.
The title made it irresistible clickbait, but the authors themselves admitted they didn’t think the object was artificial.
They explained in the paper that they pursued the question because it was “fun,” a thought experiment more than anything
Their conclusion was clear: 3I/ATLAS was almost certainly a natural object, likely a comet.
That didn’t stop social media from spinning it into something more alarming
A Facebook post with more than 12,000 reactions claimed a scientist was “certain” of alien origins. An Instagram account gathered 18,000 likes on a post warning of a November arrival. None of these posts reflected the actual scientific consensus.
Even the scenario of the comet-turned-starship slingshotting into Earth by November wasn’t based on actual tracking data
It came from the paper’s hypothetical discussion of what maneuvers an alien craft could make if it wanted to redirect toward our planet using solar or Jupiter’s gravity, Snopes confirmed. NASA addressed the speculation directly, stating the object would remain far away and posed no threat.
This wasn’t Loeb’s first attempt to keep the door open on the possibility of alien technology in space
Back in 2017 when interstellar object nicknamed “Oumuamua” passed through, he argued it was worth checking for radio signals, just in case. With 3I/ATLAS, the “fun” was in asking the question. The panic, however, was entirely manufactured online.
