The Alien Hunter’s Guide to the Future

Every evening in Maui, a telescope perched atop a volcano captures particles of light in the universe with the world’s largest digital camera. Normally it searches for asteroids dancing across the cosmos. But one night last October, it locked its gaze onto something remarkable, an unidentified flying object moving quickly through space, seemingly from another solar system.

Or at least that’s what astronomers at the University of Hawaii concluded when they discovered it. At first, they thought it was a comet, then an asteroid. But within a month, they realized the object was long and thin and unlike any asteroid known to science. They named it ‘Oumuamua—a Hawaiian word that means “messenger from the distant past.”

Thousands of miles away, a Harvard astronomer named Avi Loeb learned of the mysterious object as well. Soon, he began pondering an enticing possibility: that ‘Oumuamua was actually an alien spacecraft sending signals back to its creators. This theory may sound a bit out there. But Loeb isn’t some crackpot looking for little green men in a spaceship. He and his colleagues are part of a growing number of top-tier scientists who are applying the same rigorous standards they use on other scientific issues to tackle one of the biggest questions facing humanity: Are we alone in the universe?

Americans have long been fascinated by the possibility of alien visitors. A 2001 (the most recent one available) found that 33 percent of Americans believed aliens have visited the Earth. But scientists—both inside and outside the U.S. government—have been reluctant to take such claims seriously. From the 1947 weather balloon crash in Roswell, New Mexico, to crop circles in England, they’ve largely joined the debate only to debunk some very dubious claims. They’ve also lamented the lack of distinction most people make between alien landings—which haven’t occurred—and