The top Harvard astronomer who says an alien spaceship may be among us
- Avi Loeb and a Harvard colleague made a splash last year by claiming that a cigar-shaped rock zooming through our solar system may have been sent by aliens
- Their suggestion of an alien force at work went viral, but other astronomy experts aren’t buying it
Updated February 8, 2019: An earlier version of this story mischaracterised the statement North Carolina State University astrophysicist Katie Mack made to the Verge about why an astrophysicist might publish a theory he doesn’t believe to be true.
Before he started the whole alien spaceship thing last year, the chairman of Harvard University’s astronomy department was known for public lectures on modesty.
Personal modesty, which Avi Loeb said he learned growing up on a farm. And what Loeb calls “cosmic modesty” – the idea that it’s arrogant to assume we are alone in the universe, or even a particularly special species.
You can find a poster for one of these lectures in Loeb’s office today, though it’s a bit lost among the clutter: photos of Loeb posing under the dome of Harvard’s enormous 19th-century telescope; thank-you notes from elementary schoolchildren; a framed interview he gave The New York Times in 2014; his books on the formation of galaxies; his face, again and again – a bespectacled man in his mid-50s with a perpetually satisfied smile.
Loeb stands beside his desk on the first morning of spring courses in a creaseless suit, stapling syllabuses for his afternoon class. He points visitors to this and that on the wall.
He mentions that four TV crews were in this office on the day in the fall when his spaceship theory went viral, and now five film companies are interested in making a movie about his life.
