Hi everyone and welcome back to that UFO podcast. As always, my name is Andy and my returning guest today

is Avi Loeb, Harvard astrophysicist, head of the Galileo Project, and author of the best-selling

books, Extraterrestrial and Interstellar.

Avi's been at the centre of some of the most interesting debates around interstellar visitors

now for some years and how science should approach the search for extraterrestrial technology.

So welcome back to the podcast, Avi.

It's a great pleasure to join you, Andy.

Wonderful to have you. We need to start, of course, this discussion around 3i Atlas.

I imagine if I had a look at your calendar just now, your year, certainly since mid-20205, has been

filled up with conversations around this mysterious object that came into our space some distance

away but certainly captured the imagination of millions and for those who might I'm sure everyone's

heard about it Avey but being the expert I think on this on this object can you just summarize

what exactly was or is thei. Atlas and why did it

capture the minds of so many? Well, Three-I Atlas is the third interstellar object discovered by

telescopes, meaning an object that came from outside the solar system. And we know that because

it's moving too fast to be bound by gravity to the sun.

And this one was discovered on July 1st, 2025 by a telescope called Atlas in Chile.

It was very bright and had a number of anomalies that immediately triggered my interest.

First it was bright.

It was moving faster than the previous two interstellar objects

at 60 kilometers per second relative to the sun outside the solar system. That's very fast. And in addition,

it was moving in the plane of the planets around the sun, the ecliptic plane, which is quite

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