The fallacies behind the cult of Loeb
How media hype and misunderstanding fuel pseudoscientific fascination
Introduction
Although I do not have objective statistics, my personal (and admittedly subjective) perception from interacting on social media with many of Loeb’s followers suggests a distinctive profile. They tend to be curious minds, eager to uncover the mysteries of the universe, genuinely interested in science, yet lacking not only in-depth knowledge of the current body of scientific understanding, but even the most basic grasp of the philosophy of science itself. Moreover, they often lack access to reliable sources of information, and their natural curiosity is instead fed by the hazy and confusing mix of generalist media reports or, even worse, by the tangled web of pseudoscientific sensationalism so abundant in social networks.
I feel a certain empathy toward these followers. They remind me of myself in childhood and youth, curious and hungry for knowledge, though in my case the disinformation landscape was far less dense: mostly limited to the J.J. Benítez books or the TV programs of Jiménez del Oso in the Spanish public television. Today’s environment is vastly more chaotic and persuasive. Many of these people are bright, inquisitive minds who have simply been seduced by the power of the dark side, pseudoscience. While for some this may be a one-way path, I am convinced that many can be brought back to the light. Real science may not be as immediately dazzling as pseudoscience, and it certainly demands more intellectual effort. Yet those who embark on its path discover a much deeper and more lasting satisfaction, a genuine connection to reality that no comforting fantasy can match.
When the first wave of noise about 3I/ATLAS began, I wrote this article [2] hoping the matter would soon be clarified and I could move on and not waste any more of my time discussing it. I was wrong. Other colleagues have also written clear and compelling analyses explaining why this cult makes little sense. I especially recommend the piece by Dr. Jason Wright, a renowned astrophysicist at Penn State University, and, by the way, a respected researcher in the field of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) [3]. As you can see, we are not dealing with closed-minded scientists here.
Surprisingly, articles that present direct and transparent scientific arguments to defuse esoteric claims about 3I/ATLAS do not seem to be enough for Loeb’s followers. My interactions with some of them on social media have led me to conclude that the key is not the scientific arguments themselves, but a set of firmly held yet faulty convictions that emanate from Loeb’s own messaging and then spread unchallenged through the media. These convictions form the foundations of the cult. In this article we will examine those fallacies.
Fallacy 1: “Loeb is a highly prestigious researcher, therefore his claims must be thoughtful and well founded.”
Loeb has earned a deserved reputation in his primary area of expertise, which is theoretical cosmology. However, when it comes to comets and asteroids he is a beginner, which means his opinions on these topics are not inherently more reliable than those of any other non-expert. I'd like to point out that I do not see a problem when scientists try to make contributions outside their home field, and it can be beneficial because it brings a fresh perspective and, at the very least, it's a good learning experience for that scientist. I do this myself when I have the chance. What matters is approaching a new domain with humility, acknowledging the accumulated work of specialists who have worked very hard to get where we are, and building upon their knowledge. In contrast, Loeb often dismisses prior work, repeats beginner-level mistakes, and sometimes misuses results from earlier papers (examples discussed in [4]).
The logical error here is an appeal to authority. In a rational debate, claims should stand or fall on their evidence and reasoning, not on the proponent’s reputation. A strong CV does not substitute for data and sound analysis. But in this case, not even that is true. Loeb doesn't have a strong CV in comets, planetary science or minor bodies.
It is also worth reflecting on a paradox that reveals much about our society. When Loeb was doing his best scientific work, few of those who now appeal to his “prestige” had ever heard of him. They invoke his reputation as a guarantee of authority, yet that reputation is built precisely on the rigorous, technical research they once ignored. Only now, when Loeb engages in highly mediatic and speculative claims, has he become a household name. This illustrates a deeper problem: our society often fails to recognize genuine scientific talent unless it is wrapped in sensationalism. True intellectual merit rarely goes viral. Loeb, having both sides of the coin, is a rare example that exposes this paradox. Society neglects intellectual merit, yet eagerly uses it to legitimize pseudoscientific claims.
Fallacy 2: “Criticism of Loeb comes from envious mediocre or irrelevant scientists.”
A closely related fallacy is one that Loeb himself actively promotes. He often portrays his critics as mediocre or failed researchers, “some blogger who doesn’t even write a single paper in a decade”[5], implying that their opinions lack value because they are less “prestigious” than his.
Indeed, Loeb’s h-index is impressive (around 133). For context, mine is a more modest 44, which is much lower but nonetheless perfectly respectable for a senior researcher in my age range. But metrics like these say little about one’s expertise in a specific area. When it comes to the solar system or small-body dynamics, our levels of experience are, in fact, very much comparable. What matters is not the overall CV but domain knowledge and how it is used.
The fallacy here is a dismissal by status, a variant of the appeal to authority that turns defensive. Instead of addressing criticism on its merits, it attacks the critic’s credentials. In science, arguments are evaluated by evidence and logic, not by the h-index of those who make them.
Fallacy 3: “I’m not saying it’s an alien spacecraft, I’m just keeping an open mind.”
This is perhaps the most fundamental fallacy underlying the entire phenomenon. Loeb insists that he never claims 3I/ATLAS (or 1I/ʻOumuamua before it) is an alien spacecraft. He merely presents it as a possibility that should not be ruled out. On the surface, this sounds like intellectual openness, the scientific virtue of considering all hypotheses. In practice, however, it functions as a rhetorical shield. It lets Loeb enjoy the publicity and fascination generated by an extraordinary claim without being held accountable for its lack of evidence.
The way he frames this “possibility” is carefully crafted for maximum media impact. He defends it with vigor, even against mounting contrary evidence. For instance, the clear detection of a coma around 3I/ATLAS, which unequivocally identifies it as a comet. Rather than accept this, Loeb accused astronomers worldwide of misinterpreting or mishandling their data, as though the entire field had suddenly forgotten how to image a comet. This strategy keeps the notion alive in the public imagination long after it has lost any scientific plausibility.
Adding to the irony, in the "Loeb scale"[9] that he himself designed to quantify the likelihood that an interstellar object is artificial, where level 8 represents confirmed technology, he assigns 3I/ATLAS a 4, and that is "being as conservative as he can"[10]. In other words, while publicly insisting that he is merely “keeping an open mind,” he simultaneously places the object halfway to confirmed alien technology on a scale that bears his own name. This is not cautious curiosity, it is calibrated sensationalism.
It is essential to distinguish between reasonable hypotheses and unreasonable assumptions. Science thrives on creative speculation, but those ideas must remain in the realm of what is remotely plausible. It's not that implausible ideas are forbidden. It's just that there is a point beyond which it's absolutely useless to sustain such ideas because they don't lead anywhere.
Imagine seeing a chicken with unusually bright red and yellow feathers, unlike any you have ever seen. You could reasonably ask what genetic or environmental factor causes such colors. But if you say, “Maybe it’s an alien chicken,” and demand that everyone remain open to that possibility, you have stepped outside the realm of science. That claim is absurd and will not help us understand the weirdness of the chicken. It won't help advance our knowledge but maybe you can sell a few books about alien chickens.
To put it bluntly, such suggestions do not expand scientific inquiry; they erode it. They replace curiosity with spectacle. By presenting the absurd as plausible, Loeb confuses the public about what science is and how it works. True open-mindedness is not the refusal to discard bad ideas. It is the willingness to follow evidence wherever it leads, even when that means letting go of the story that sells best.
Philosophically, open-mindedness is not about accepting all ideas as potentially true. It is about being responsive to reasons and evidence. As John Dewey, Karl Popper, and later contemporary epistemologists have emphasized, genuine openness means a willingness to revise beliefs when the evidence demands it, not a refusal to judge or discard implausible claims. Science depends on this balance. Hypotheses must be entertained freely but rejected when refuted. To be so open-minded that one cannot close a case is not a virtue. It is epistemic confusion. As Carl Sagan memorably put it, “one must have an open mind, but not so much that your brains will fall out” (the earliest written reference we know of comes from Max Radin, 1937). The fallacy here is to equate discarding refuted ideas with closed-mindedness.
Fallacy 4: “They criticized Galileo, now they criticize me. Therefore, I must be right.”
This is one of the most seductive and enduring fallacies in the history of science. It is sometimes called Galileo’s Gambit: the idea that being rejected or criticized by the scientific establishment is a sign that one’s revolutionary ideas are correct. After all, Galileo was mocked and persecuted, and he turned out to be right. So, the reasoning goes, if Loeb is also criticized, he too must be right.
The fallacy lies in the false equivalence. For every Galileo who was unfairly dismissed, there were thousands of cranks and self-proclaimed visionaries who were also rejected, and rightly so. Being opposed by the establishment does not make one Galileo. It only makes one opposed. What matters is whether the evidence supports the claim.
Loeb has gone as far as naming his project to search for UFOs the Galileo Project[6], implying a comparison of his situation to that of the historical Galileo. The choice of name is no accident. It reinforces the narrative of the lonely visionary defying orthodoxy and being silenced by the establishment, a myth carefully crafted to attract public sympathy and media attention.
In reality, what Loeb faces is not persecution but the normal and healthy process of scientific scrutiny. Peer criticism is not censorship, it is quality control. The fact that his extraordinary claims about 1I/ʻOumuamua or 3I/ATLAS have not convinced specialists does not prove that the community is narrow-minded, but rather that his arguments fail to meet the evidential standards that science demands.
Comparing oneself to Galileo is an act of self-flattery, not of science. Galileo was not right because he was persecuted. He was right despite being persecuted, because his observations and reasoning were correct. That is the crucial distinction that the cult of Loeb tends to overlook. This fallacy is so well known that it has its own name, the Galileo gambit.
Fallacy 5: “You are too narrow-minded to believe in life in the universe.”
This argument is as unfair as it is misleading. Loeb often implies that the scientific community rejects his claims about 1I/ʻOumuamua or 3I/ATLAS because it is closed-minded toward the very possibility of life elsewhere. This is simply false. Most scientists accept that life may exist elsewhere in the universe, and many of us actively work to find it (I count myself among them). The issue is not whether life exists, but how big and empty the universe is, and how far away that life might be in space and time.
We know that stars are separated by enormous distances. We also know that, across the 4.5-billion-year history of our planet, a technological civilization has existed only during the last few centuries, a vanishingly brief instant on the cosmic timeline. In other words, if you observed Earth at a random moment in its lifetime, you would almost certainly find no technological civilization at all. It might take hundreds of millions of inhabited planets to find even one hosting an intelligent species capable of technology.
Equating skepticism toward Loeb’s reasoning with disbelief in extraterrestrial life is a rhetorical trap. It casts critics as dogmatic materialists while portraying himself as the lone visionary daring to ask the “big questions.” In truth, scientists around the world devote their careers to exactly those questions, through the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), astrobiology, planetary science, and exoplanet research.
I'd like to mention some of them, in case the reader would like to follow some serious SETI research: David Kipping, Amadeo Balbi, Sofia Sheikh, Jason Wright, Mike Garrett, the late Claudio Maccone, Jill Tarter, and many others have spent decades developing rigorous methods to explore these possibilities. Their work is driven by both curiosity and discipline, the same combination that makes science effective. None of them confuse speculation with discovery, and none need to inflate their claims to make the search meaningful.
Rejecting Loeb’s alien-spacecraft hypothesis does not mean rejecting life in the universe. It simply means applying common sense and the scientific methodology. Science’s openness to the possibility of life is vast. What it resists, rightly, is the erosion of rigor in its name.
Fallacy 6: “At least this object is being scrutinized thanks to Loeb’s courage to speak out.”
This narrative is false. 3I/ATLAS, like 1I/ʻOumuamua before it, was already under intense scrutiny by the scientific community long before Loeb’s public interventions. These are fascinating objects by any measure: interstellar visitors that offer a unique window into other planetary systems. The international response to their discovery was immediate, coordinated, and deeply engaged. Loeb did not ignite scientific interest; he hijacked it.
In fact, a clear pattern emerges in his media career. His “alien hypothesis” always attaches itself to phenomena that are already high-profile and widely discussed: the early mystery of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) in 2017, the excitement surrounding 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2018, and now 3I/ATLAS. He consistently chooses topics that are already in the spotlight, where public curiosity is guaranteed and scientific uncertainty can be spun into drama.
Meanwhile, he avoids truly puzzling cases where the scientific community remains genuinely stumped, such as the Wow! signal, or Boyajian’s (Tabby’s) Star. One wonders if that's because there he would not be the first to cry wolf... I mean.. aliens.
This behavior is not whistleblowing. It is opportunism wrapped in the language of dissent. Real scientific courage lies in following the evidence even into obscurity, not in chasing the headlines once others have done the hard observational work.
Fallacy 7: “We must be humble, just like me.”
Loeb frequently preaches humility[7] (he says that he learned it by working in a farm[8]), which, in my view, is almost comically ironic. Because his actual conduct exemplifies quite the opposite. He acts like a driver who sees every other car traveling in the opposite direction and concludes that everyone else must be going the wrong way. He positions himself as the only one who has discovered the truth, asserting that all other scientists (experts in fields where he is not) are simply wrong. Even if he were correct, I struggle to recall bolder statements in the history of science, perhaps aside from Descartes' claim that he intentionally omitted some findings, so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovering them.
Loeb’s brand of “humility” often turns the principle upside down. In his narrative, holding the truth becomes proof of modesty, and disagreement is merely evidence of other people’s arrogance. Not only is he the one who has seen the truth, he even went so far as to suggest that 3I/ATLAS might have been an intelligence test set by a superior alien civilization. Accordingly, in his own story, he would be the only scientist to pass the alien IQ test. Ironically, he confused the concept and referred to it as a Turing test, which is something entirely different (a test designed to determine whether a machine can think like a human).
But wait, there’s more. He also proposed a scale to measure the likelihood of an interstellar object being artificial and named it the “Loeb scale”[9]. While I am not a historian of science, this is the first time I have heard of such self-naming. Traditionally, when a law, theorem, or scale bears someone’s name, it is because others have chosen to honor that contribution by associating it with its discoverer’s name, not because the author baptized it after himself. Naming one’s own scale is, in rhetorical terms, the equivalent of erecting one’s own statue.
The pattern extends beyond his writings. In one notorious public exchange, Loeb spoke in a dismissive and rude manner while mansplaining SETI to Dr. Jill Tarter[4], a pioneering scientist whose work literally defined the field. When a person claims to embody humility yet treats colleagues as unenlightened, the contradiction speaks for itself.
I have rarely seen a public figure express themselves with such unapologetic self-importance, perhaps with the exception of Isaac Asimov or Paco Umbral. I do not condemn this; in fact, I have always admired Asimov’s work. Needless to say, a person’s personality is irrelevant when judging whether they are right or wrong. What I wish to highlight here is the fallacy of calling for humbleness while being, shall we say, anomalously arrogant among human beings.
Fallacy 8: “Anomalies point to extraordinary explanations.”
A key element in Loeb’s rhetoric is his use of the word “anomaly.” It is a term that carries an aura of mystery, suggesting that something is not only unusual but also fundamentally inexplicable, in this case a potential sign of alien technology. Yet, in science, anomalous does not mean unexplainable. It simply means that it deviates from average behavior. In my previous article[2] I used anomalies in the same sense as Loeb to point out peculiar features of my own anatomy. According to Loeb's logic, that would lead us to conclude that I'm an alien being.
Loeb systematically reframes non-average features of the objects as “anomalies,” then treats those as evidence that the object in question, be it 1I/ʻOumuamua or 3I/ATLAS, might be artificial. But in reality, most of those “anomalies” either disappear under closer scrutiny[2,3] or fall comfortably within the natural diversity of cometary and asteroidal behavior.
To illustrate this, imagine meeting a person with some peculiar features, perhaps unusual hair, an uncommon height, or an odd accent... Loeb would list those features as anomalous if he wanted to convince that this person is not a human being but, say, a car. However, that's complete nonsense. You might describe that person as peculiar, but you would not conclude that they are an automobile. A car would differ from a person in entirely different and obvious ways. In the same way, a comet with some out-of-the-average characteristics is still a comet.
By calling ordinary variations “anomalies,” Loeb shifts the burden of proof. He invites the audience to treat normal diversity as evidence of alien design. This is a subtle but powerful linguistic trick. It replaces statistical reasoning with narrative suspense. In doing so, it exploits a cognitive bias deeply rooted in human perception: our tendency to mistake unfamiliar for unnatural.
As discussed in detail in other articles [2,3], the supposed “anomalies” of 3I/ATLAS are fully consistent with what we would expect from a natural cometary object, once observational uncertainties and model assumptions are properly handled. In other words, the mystery evaporates when the data are treated correctly.
Conclusion
In the end, the problem is not Avi Loeb himself, but the cultural ecosystem that rewards spectacle over substance. Loeb is a brilliant and eloquent man who could have been a powerful voice for science. Instead, he has become a mirror reflecting our collective fascination with mystery and our impatience with uncertainty. Curiosity is the spark that ignites every discovery, but when curiosity loses its discipline, it drifts into mythology. When idle fantasies take over, science turns into storytelling.
There is also a deeper flaw shared not only by Loeb’s narrative but by most tales of alien visitation: the presumption that we are somehow special. Current models estimate that hundreds of interstellar objects pass through our Solar System each year, going unnoticed because they are too faint or because we are not looking in exactly the right direction. Yet, by pure chance, we have observed only three so far: 1I/ʻOumuamua, 2I/Borisov, and 3I/ATLAS. Three out of hundreds.
The odds that the one we happened to detect during our brief technological era is not a natural body but an alien spacecraft stretch credibility to the breaking point. It would mean that, among billions upon trillions of comets adrift in the Galaxy, the only one visible to us at this precise historical instant was the visitor we have all been waiting for. That is not humility; it is anthropocentrism in disguise.
3I/ATLAS does not come from the direction of any nearby star. At its measured speed, it must have been traveling through interstellar space for billions of years, crossing the Galaxy long before humans even existed. If it were a spacecraft, the coincidence of its passing through our Solar System during the few decades in which we could observe it would make us not just lucky but cosmically privileged, an idea that contradicts statistics, common sense... and cosmic humility.
The narrative endures in our collective imagination because we have grown up in the culture of movies, and each of us carries an inner longing to be the protagonist of some cosmic story. It feels natural that special things should happen during our lifetimes. Han Solo says “Never tell me the odds” in Star Wars when confronted with the low probability of surviving an adventure. And he is absolutely right, as a movie character. Probabilities do not apply to him, only the will of the screenwriters, higher beings whose design dictates every event in the story. In science, by contrast, we work under what could be called a no-movie principle: we are not special, and events unfold with absolute indifference to us. This principle is, in a sense, the boundary between science and religion.
Loeb has recently declared his view that the Messiah will be an alien from outer space, a striking metaphor for how his narrative has shifted from astronomy to theology. There is something profoundly human in this: the desire for revelation, for a cosmic confirmation that we are not alone and that our questions matter. Yet that longing, noble as it is, should remind us why science exists in the first place: to separate what we hope to be true from what we learn to be true.
Those who follow Loeb are not enemies of science. They are, in many cases, its disappointed lovers, people drawn to the wonder of the cosmos but misled by the seduction of easy answers. The way back is not through ridicule but through empathy and gentle conversation. We must show that real science is capable of inspiring awe far deeper and more lasting than any story of alien messiahs or cosmic conspiracies. If there is a lesson in the “cult of Loeb,” it is that science must learn to communicate wonder without surrendering rigor.
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