The object that blew on Earth probably came from the extraterrestrial world, says the Harvard professor

Cambridge, Massachusetts ‘A professor at Harvard University says we’re probably not alone in the universe. Astronomer Avi Loeb’s new book “Alien” examines the 2017 flight of a space object that he thinks was truly out of this world.

“At first people thought, ‘Well, it must be a rock, just like the asteroids or comets we’ve seen before in the solar system,'” Loeb told CBSN Boston’s Paula Ebben. “But as they’ve received more data on this, it seems very strange.”

The cigar-shaped object seen by the telescopes was nicknamed “Oumuamua” – meaning “a messenger that stretches from the distant past” in Hawaiian.

It was 10 times longer than it was wide and was traveling at 196,000 mph, researchers said at the time.

“It didn’t look like a comet, yet it behaved like something with extra thrust,” Loeb said.

NASA has confirmed that it is “the first object ever seen in our solar system that is known to have originated elsewhere,” but said its origins are unknown.

Loeb argues in his book that the object was probably remnants of advanced alien technology – space debris from light years away. It may have been a type of “light ship” powered by sunlight, a technology that people are currently developing to explore space.

“There may be a lot of space debris there or there may be a probe,” he said. “We don’t know, because we haven’t collected enough data, enough evidence and I’m just warning everyone to look for objects like this, so that next time someone comes to examine it more closely.”

Loeb said it was time for researchers to look for “possible messages in a bottle” like Oumuamua instead of just looking for radio signals as evidence of other civilizations.

He said his ideas are not popular in the scientific community at the moment – talking about the potential of extraterrestrial intelligence is “out of the mainstream and should not be”.

“We should be open and look for evidence, rather than assuming that everything we see in the sky must be stones,” he said.

For those who doubt the existence of aliens, Loeb says to consider the chances.

“We know that half of the sun-like stars have a planet the size of Earth at about the same distance from the star, so they can have liquid water on the surface – that’s the chemistry of life,” he said.

“That means that if you roll the dice billions of times in the Milky Way galaxy, we’re probably not alone, and we’re probably not the sharpest cookie in the jar, the smartest kid on the block.”