When a Harvard Professor Talks About Aliens
Astrophysicists usually don’t get chased by reporters, but that’s what happened to Avi Loeb last November.
They bombarded Loeb’s phone lines. They showed up at his office with television crews. One of them even followed him home and confronted him at the front door, demanding Loeb answer a question.
“Do you believe that extraterrestrial intelligence exists?”
Days earlier, Loeb had published a new research paper in an astrophysics journal. Scientists publish thousands of research papers every year in journals big and small, prestigious and obscure. Usually, aside from some basic coverage by science journalists, these papers attract little public attention. But Loeb’s latest work covered a topic that is historically very attention-getting: aliens.
The subject of the paper was a mysterious space rock known as ‘Oumuamua. When it was in October 2017, the rock was the talk of the astronomy community. ‘Oumuamua is the first interstellar object astronomers have seen in our solar system; it did not originate here, but likely traveled for billions and billions of years,
