The Third Visitor

What We Keep Seeing in Rocks That Won't Look Back

October 24, 2025. Joe Rogan’s studio. Harvard’s Avi Loeb leans in, dead serious. The comet isn’t a metaphor. It’s a Trojan Horse. Literally.

The ancient Greeks, he noted, received what looked like a gift but contained hidden threat. Comet 3I/ATLAS, then approaching perihelion, appeared natural but might carry alien technology. He’d calculated the odds: one in ten quadrillion that all the comet’s features would occur naturally. He’d created a scale (the Loeb Scale) for evaluating potential alien artifacts. This comet ranked Level 4. He’d secured congressional support. NASA should release high-resolution images from Mars orbiters during the October close approach.

NASA’s response: “It looks like a comet.”

The gap between those two positions (ten quadrillion to one versus “it looks like a comet”) reveals more about human psychology than cometary composition. We’ve been performing this dance since October 2017, when Pan-STARRS1 discovered ‘Oumuamua tumbling through the solar system. Before that, the Wow! Signal of 1977. Before that, Lowell’s canals on Mars. The pattern predates radio astronomy, predates telescopes, likely predates written language. Something arrives from beyond our boundary. We need it to be a message.

3I/ATLAS (humanity’s third confirmed interstellar visitor) passed perihelion on October 30, 2025, triggering the most sophisticated international scientific response ever coordinated for an astronomical object. Over 30 observatories across six continents. Every major space telescope. Seamless data sharing through the Minor Planet Center. The ISS coordinated observations while passing overhead. Mars orbiters attempted imaging during a 30-million-kilometer flyby.

The comet itself carries material 7-14 billion years old, possibly older than our sun, ejected from a parent star system that died before Earth coalesced from the solar nebula. It crossed interstellar space for eons carrying chemistry we’ve never seen processed through our own system’s formation: a direct sample of how molecules form in another star’s birth. Traveling at 58 kilometers per second on a hyperbolic trajectory that will carry it back to the void after briefly passing through our neighborhood.

That should be remarkable enough. It isn’t.