A new research seems to have confirmed that 3I/ATLAS is a natural comet, dispelling theories of its unnatural origin. Scientists involved in the Breakthrough Listen Initiative’s project stated that 3I/ATLAS has cometary characteristics and there are no signs that suggest it’s an alien spacecraft. The research was conducted by a team, led by Benjamin Jacobson-Bell from the University of California, Berkeley, that looked for ‘technosignatures‘ from the comet using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, US.
‘Technosignatures‘ are signals emerging from a supposed technological object belonging to an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation. Radio transmissions are the most popular signs astronomers rely on. If 3I/ATLAS was an alien spacecraft, the 100-metre-wide Green Bank Telescope – which is super sensitive to radio signals – would have detected transmissions even ten times fainter than a cell phone.
“We all would have been thrilled to find technosignatures coming from 3I/ATLAS, but they’re just not there,” Jacobson-Bell told Space.com. “Finding no signals was the result we expected, due to the significant evidence for 3I/ATLAS being a comet with only natural features.”
For this research, which is yet to be peer reviewed, astronomers looked for narrowband radio signals, which are the brightest technosignatures because they take little energy to produce and travel longer distances. Many such signals are produced by man-made objects as well, so they devised filters to distinguish them from extraterrestrial signal. The researchers found nine ‘events’ – potential technosignatures – but they turned out to be transmissions from Earth.
“Past work has shown that 3I/ATLAS looks like a comet and behaves like a comet, and our observations show that, like a comet, 3I/ATLAS is not a source of technological signals. In the end, there were no surprises,” Jacobson-Bell told Space.com.
Is Comet 3I/ATLAS’s debate settled then?
Not quite. Harvard scientist Avi Loeb, who first raised the possibility of 3I/ATLAS being an alien spacecraft, is still suspicious. Yesterday, he published a blog questioning the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which refused to “confirm or deny” any information upon inquiry by ufologist and researcher John Greenwald Jr. under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Loeb argues that if 3I/ATLAS is indeed just a comet – as stated by NASA as well – why is the CIA maintaining secrecy around it? He even suggests continued monitoring of 3I/ATLAS and searching for signs of any probes being released from the comet – sort of like a mothership. Over the last few months, Loeb highlighted several ‘anomalies‘ of the comet to support his argument that it may have an unnatural origin.
The comet 3I/ATLAS is the third confirmed interstellar object in our solar system and it was discovered by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) on July 1, 2025. It reached perihelion (closest point to the Sun) on October 29 and made its closest approach to Earth on December 19, from a distance of 270 million kilometres.
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