2017: A space odyssey!

As we turn the page from the hellish year of 2020 to 2021, let’s go back in time to a seemingly better moment, at least by some accounts: 2017..

Traveling back into amnesia lane, let’s look at what we said on November 23, 2017, the first time that we ever mentioned Oumuamua:

An interstellar interloper is dashing through our solar system MORE: “This thing is an oddball,” said Karen Meech from the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy, leader of an international team studying ‘Oumuamua. “What we found was a rapidly rotating object, at least the size of a football field, that changed in brightness quite dramatically. This change in brightness hints that ‘Oumuamua could be more than 10 times longer than it is wide — something which has never been seen in our own solar system.”..Some astronomors now seriously wondering if Oumuamua is a spaceship!Artificial lights are eating away natural darkness on the planet Earth..

A year later in December 2018, we reported how some scientists said that it could be an alien craft:

Now a pair of Harvard researchers are raising the possibility that Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft. As they say in a paper to be published Nov. 12 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the object “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.”

On November 5, 2018, NBC news reported this:

“It is impossible to guess the purpose behind ‘Oumuamua without more data,” Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department and a co-author of the paper, told NBC News MACH in an email. If ‘Oumuamua is a lightsail, he added, one possibility is that it was floating in interstellar space when our solar system ran into it, “like a ship bumping into a buoy on the surface of the ocean.”

And now, Avi Loeb wrote a book about Oumuamua.. He said aliens visited us in 2017, and more are on the way!

The New York POST is among those reporting:

In his upcoming book, “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), out Jan. 26, the professor lays out a compelling case for why an object that recently wandered into our solar system was not just another rock but actually a piece of alien technology. 

AND THIS:

At first, scientists thought it was an ordinary comet. But Loeb said that assumption ran the risk of allowing “the familiar to define what we might discover.” 

“What would happen if a caveman saw a cellphone?” he asked. “He’s seen rocks all his life, and he would have thought it was just a shiny rock.” 

“This would make ‘Oumuamua’s geometry more extreme by at least a few times in aspect ratio — or its width to its height — than the most extreme asteroids or comets that we have ever seen,” Loeb writes in his book. What’s more, ‘Oumuamua was unusually bright. It was at least “ten times more reflective than typical solar system [stony] asteroids or comets,” the author writes. 

But the anomaly that really pushed Loeb toward his E.T. hypothesis was the way ‘Oumuamua moved. 

The book will go on,

But ‘Oumuamua didn’t follow this calculated trajectory. The object, in fact, accelerated “slightly, but to a highly statistically significant extent,” Loeb writes, as it moved away from the sun. 

In other words, he writes that it was being pushed by a force besides the sun’s gravity alone. 

Meanwhile, Hawaii NEWS NOW reports this strange anomaly:

An unidentified flying object spotted in the evening sky over Leeward Oahu prompted witnesses to call 911 on Tuesday. The sighting happened about 8:30 p.m.There are multiple videos of what appears to be a glowing‚ oblong mass — both in the sky and in the water.Officials from the Federal Aviation Administration say there were no aircraft incidents or accidents in this area at the time. But multiple witnesses reported seeing a large blue object fall out of the sky and into the ocean.