Back in July, astronomers spotted an object rocketing toward the Solar System. It's scheduled for a high-speed drive-by of Jupiter, Venus, and Mars later this year, at which point scientists should be able to determine what it is. The consensus is that it's a comet, but a controversial Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Loeb, opined that it could be a self-propelled alien probe. And he isn't backing down on his claims. Recently, he suggested that light reflected by the object, dubbed "3I/ATLAS," isn't coming from the sun but could be from an onboard power source, such as a nuclear reactor, both the Daily Mail and the New York Post reported.
You have to give it to Loeb, he's brought a fresh surge of credibility to the tatty annals of UFO lore. He hit the pop-culture radar screen when he argued that an earlier mystery object, Oumuamua, seen in 2017, might have been a vestige of alien tech. After 3I/ATLAS was discovered, he and some other researchers offered a largely speculative paper that suggested it indicated alien origins, as well. They hedged their bets, of course, calling their effort a "largely a pedagogical exercise" and concluding that "[b]y far the most likely outcome will be that 3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet."