Harvard Professor Says Alien Technology Visited Earth in 2017

Here's the first public paper I could find off hand on the topic. The acceleration due to outgassing of 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (of Rosetta spacecraft fame) https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.02701

While I haven't personally seen anything that decides if Oumuamua counts as a comet or not, thats beside the point, since anything can outgas with enough heat. It appears to be covered with Tholins (based on the spectroscopy https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.06552) which aren't immune to outgassing, and likely make up at least part of the "anomalous" acceleration.

So I don't come across as just dismissive... heres Loeb's claim (the original paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.11490) the key part being

> From a theoretical point of view, Rafikov (2018) has shown that if outgassing was responsible for the acceleration (as originally proposed by Micheli et al. 2018), then the associated outgassing torques would have driven a rapid evolution in ‘Oumuamua’s spin, incompatible with observations. > If not cometary activity, what can drive the nongravitational acceleration observed? In this Letter we explore the possibility of ‘Oumuamua being a thin object accelerated by Solar radiation pressure, which would naturally result in an excess acceleration ∆a ∝ r^−2.

The only evidence is basically one paper. Rafikov's https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06389 and its not used for much beyond saying "it cant be outgassing" which is a bad interpretation since at the end of that paper Rafikov says.

> Based on these arguments, as well as the lack of direct indicators of outgassing, we conclude that the classification of ’Oumuamua as a volatile-rich comet is dubious and raises more questions than it provides explanations. > We encourage further analyses of the astrometric data to better characterize its anomalous acceleration (Micheli et al. 2018). Settling the issue of whether this unique object has asteroidal or cometary composition is crucial for understanding its origin (Rafikov 2018a).

So as a moderately science literate person on the outside, it just feels like initial paper was idle conjecture not serious science, and now he's so deep in the hole even Lassie cant save him now... So he wrote a book to make money instead.