Avi Loeb

And so I reached out through the White House

to the US Space Command.

I basically expressed my frustration at dinner of this board on physics and astronomy, and one of the members helped me reach out to the US Space Command.

And we ended up with a letter from the US Space Command to NASA stating that the 99.99% confidence this object is interstellar in origin based on the data that they have access to.

So not the published data, but all the data they have access to.

Some of it is classified maybe because it comes from satellites that are used to monitor, for example, ballistic missiles right now.

At any event, this letter convinced me to lead an expedition, but it didn't change the opinion of my colleagues.

The paper got published based on the letter, but after that, there were other papers written saying, we don't believe the US government.

This is not an interstellar object because the US government makes mistakes.

Then they also said, you went to the wrong place.

All kinds of arguments.

What you found is human made.

Well, do you want to tell the story about that?

Because look, no matter, I followed the story that spherules and the seismic data, I followed all of that.

even if it turns out that it's not extrasolar, whatever it is, I think it's a very important mission because you've got a Harvard scientist rents a boat, drags a magnet across the Pacific Ocean.

That's exciting.

That's what makes science fun.

You don't even need to be right.

You just need to get people excited about it.

By the way, this was my first expedition and there were lots of hurdles along the way.