3I/ATLAS Not Alone: Objects Spotted Alongside It

Reports are emerging that 3I/ATLAS, the interstellar visitor racing through our solar system, may not be traveling alone. Amateur astronomers analyzing raw images from NASA’s Perseverance rover claim to see multiple fast-moving objects in the same frames, not just one. When asked directly on Newsmax whether telescopes on Earth are picking up other objects flying alongside 3I/ATLAS, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb did not dismiss the possibility. Instead, he revealed what his research team is doing about it. According to Loeb, “There are always objects. The question is whether we see unusual activity. And in fact, I tasked my research team at the Galileo Project to monitor the sky for any unusual activity, because it is possible that if it is an alien probe, that in fact it would release some mini probes that will visit the planets.”

Multiple Mars orbiters — NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the European Space Agency’s Mars Express, and the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter — all captured coordinated observations of this object during its October 3rd flyby. These were pre-planned scientific observations designed to gather the highest resolution data ever obtained of an interstellar object passing within 29 million kilometers of Mars. The data was collected and the instruments functioned, but some of these images have not been released. When Youtuber Stefan Burns posted his time-lapse animation online, other amateur astronomers immediately began their own analysis. A German user called NightMonkey claimed to see multiple objects, not just one comet — multiple fast-moving points of light. At the 3-second mark of Burns’ animation, a brief green flash appears that is not a camera artifact. According to spectroscopic analysis from the Very Large Telescope in Chile, 3I/ATLAS is what astronomers call carbon chain depleted, containing virtually no dicarbon. This means it should not be glowing green, yet the green flash appeared.

According to Loeb’s statement on Fox News, the European Space Agency released data from the ExoMars camera on one of its orbiters of Mars, detecting the interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS that was discovered on July 1st, 2025. Loeb noted that the object is quite large and aligned in its path with the plane of the planets around the sun, calling it “a rare gift of a highly visible object that many of our space probes can look at.” As more data emerges, 3I/ATLAS is breaking rules that comets are not supposed to break. Its chemistry is wrong, its behavior is anomalous, and its trajectory through our solar system aligns with multiple planets in ways that statistical models say should not happen by chance. In contrast to its two interstellar predecessors, 3I/ATLAS is thought to be much faster, traveling at 58 kilometers per second and older, with estimates placing it between 3 and 11 billion years old.

Image of 3I/Atlas

The mystery deepens with a connection to one of astronomy’s most famous unexplained signals. On August 15th, 1977, Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope detected a signal so strong and unusual that astronomers wrote the word “wow” on the printout. The 72-second signal came from the direction of Sagittarius at a frequency of 1420 megahertz — the hydrogen line, a frequency so fundamental to radio astronomy that any civilization capable of radio technology would monitor it. According to Loeb’s analysis on Newsmax, working backwards from 3I/ATLAS’s current trajectory revealed that it came from about the same direction in the sky as the WOW Signal, within nine degrees. The chance for a random alignment of the two directions is just 0.6 percent.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter carries an instrument called HiRISE — the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment. According to Loeb’s statement on Fox News, the best data is yet to come from this camera, which is half a meter in diameter and can provide 30-kilometer resolution of 3I/ATLAS. The data was taken, but because of a government shutdown in the United States, it has not been seen. NASA’s official statement has been minimal, noting that Mars orbiters successfully conducted their observations and data is being processed, but this statement was issued over three weeks ago. Mars orbiters routinely make their images public within days, yet nothing from the 3I/ATLAS flyby has appeared.

Right now, 3I/ATLAS is behind the sun from Earth’s perspective. Ground-based telescopes cannot see it against solar glare, and space-based observatories like Hubble and Webb need to avoid pointing too close to the sun to protect their sensitive instruments. We go blind for approximately three weeks — three weeks where the object experiences maximum solar heating, maximum radiation pressure, and maximum stress on any structural components. According to Loeb’s statement on Fox News, when people asked whether NASA’s delay in releasing data might indicate evidence for alien intelligence, he responded that “this shutdown and the delay is not a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence, but more a sign of terrestrial stupidity.” The European Space Agency’s JUICE spacecraft will observe 3I/ATLAS in late November, just after perihelion, though the data will not be available until February 2026. Overall, 3I/ATLAS remains anomalous — its mass, chemistry, trajectory, and possible alignment with the WOW Signal individually have potential natural explanations, but collectively, the picture becomes increasingly difficult to fit into comfortable categories.

Sources

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