Harvard Professor Avi Loeb says a space object that flew past our planet in 2017 before swerving around the Sun was likely made by aliens, with the Daily Star quoting him as assuming that the objeсt could have been junk like a missing part of a spacecraft left by ingenious extraterrestrials.
He went on to suggest that humanity would be better off building special UFO detection stations wherever sightings are reported, adding it would be an appropriate and cheap way of testing a bunch of conspiracy theories about aliens, including their purported visitations to Area 51.
"People can report things from personal experience that are not necessarily true", Loeb, an Israeli-American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology, remarked, before going on to say:
"We should invest a relatively small sum of money, it will not cost much, in deploying the best instruments we have now in the same sites from where the reports came and monitor the environment for a long enough time".
Separately, he remarked, aliens would hardly be really willing to come and stay with humans, and there supposedly are reasons for this, like the difference in conditions, and hence the colour of the surrounding landscape.
"The most common stars in the galaxy are dwarf stars. Most stars are about a tenth of the mass of the Sun and they are also twice cooler than the Sun so they are red", Loeb said, going on to explain that they emit mostly infrared radiation, and "if there is life on planets next to them... that life will have infrared eyes and the grass will not be green on those planets it will be dark red".
This is the reason why, he said, interstellar guests will hardly "market Earth as a desirable destination" because the infrared eyes of most of the creatures in the Milky Way Earth's green grass would not seem particularly appealing.
He brought up the so-called Fermi's Paradox, arguing it could be the exact reason why such ET guests won't come to see us. Yet, he noted, it could likewise be so because "we are not very interesting in terms of our intelligence".
"For some reason humans do not cooperate and that's really unfortunate, and it's not a sign of intelligence so I can imagine a much smarter kid on the block", the academic assumed.
UFO Enigma Never Ceases
The public has demonstrated a unique interest in purported extraterrestrial sightings over the past few years, with an increasing number of reports in international media setting conspiracy theorists' tongues wagging.
Even the authorities in some countries appear to be actively weighing in.
"The subject of UFOs is of interest to the government because some of the reports might relate to instruments used by other nations, for example the US is not aware of, so they pose a national security threat so there's an interest in exploring what they are", Prof. Loeb noted.
To illustrate the matter, in early January, the US Central Intelligence Agency made available its catalogue of declassified data on unidentified flying objects, or aerial phenomena, as the Pentagon refers to UFOs.
These files, which cover everything from sightings of flying saucers ostensibly steered by extraterrestrials, which have in recent years come in abundance, to unexplained bomb blasts, can be accessed by anyone interested at The Black Vault website, operated by journalist and podcaster John Greenewald Jr.