"We should put all possibilities on the table that it's a rock, a comet, or something else until we get the evidence, the data that will tell us what it is," Loeb said in an interview with WBZ-TV.

The paper presented several anomalous characteristics of the object, which could indicate that it is not a comet at all but instead a directed craft.

Avi Loeb: 'the orbit of 3I/ATLAS coincides with the plane of the Earth by only 5 degrees - the probability of such a coincidence occurring randomly is only 0.2%'.