Avi Loeb

Congress tasked NASA to find 90 percent of all objects bigger than a football field passing close to Earth.

These are potential killer asteroids that can destroy a region on Earth.

We want to protect the Earth, so we want to know about them.

And they asked NASA and the National Science Foundation to build observatories that will search for such objects.

And that's why Pan-STARRS was established.

And then it saw a near-Earth object, so they flagged it for that reason.

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

And that was Oumuamua.

And then it looked weird.

Now, I had no agenda.

I was working on cosmology.

At the time, you know, I was working on black holes.

I was the founding director of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard.

And Stephen Hawking had Passover at my home in 2016.

This object was discovered a year later.

And I said, well, okay, that's interesting, but it has anomalies.

The amount of brightness coming from it by reflecting sunlight changes by a factor of 10 as it's tumbling.

That's really strange.

And I started getting more and more into the anomalies.

How do you say it?