Since its discovery in early July, Loeb has posited that there's a chance that 3I/ATLAS is instead a piece of technology sent to us by an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization. He pointed out its highly unusual trajectory, which had already brought it suspiciously close to Mars last week, as well as its enormous suspected mass, measuring in at over 33 billion tons, making it orders of magnitude larger than the two previously observed interstellar objects. The object has also been shown to have a highly unusual chemical composition and sport a puzzling "anti-tail " pointing in the direction of the Sun.