Avi Loeb and Sean M. Kirkpatrick discuss the possibility of such a scenario in their recent article on UFOs.

Titled ‘Physical Constraints on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’, the paper, which is still in the peer review phase, examines the alleged movements and capabilities of unexplained objects sighted by U.S. Navy pilots off the coast of the United States.

Its authors are certainly no strangers to UFOs; Loeb is an astrophysicist who has been heavily involved in the search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, while Dr. Kirkpatrick is the director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

In a previous story about their paper, we reported that they had concluded that the purported capabilities of “highly maneuverable” objects sighted by U.S. Navy pilots are so extreme that the simple friction involved should have produced a visible fireball as well as a corresponding radio signature. that could be detected on radar.

Now it appears that the pair are also investigating the idea that an extraterrestrial mothership passing through our solar system could have launched a series of smaller probes designed to enter Earth’s atmosphere and study us without our knowledge.

“[Interstellar meteorite impacts inspired me] to consider the possibility that an artificial interstellar object could potentially be a mothership that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth, an operational construct not unlike NASA missions,” Loeb told Live Science.

“Those ‘dandelion seeds’… could be separated from the mothership by the gravitational pull of the Sun’s tides or by a maneuverability.”

In the paper, Loeb and Kirkpatrick suggest that these probes could reach Earth and enter our atmosphere undetected by astronomers.

It’s also possible, given the time it would take to travel great distances through space, that the civilization that gave birth to the mothership may no longer exist.