It was in October 2017 that researchers discovered a weird interstellar object that came into the solar system named 'Oumuamua'. Post the discovery of Oumuamua, top Harvard expert Avi Loeb claimed that Oumuamua could be most probably an alien spacecraft.
And now, Avi Loeb and his team of researchers carried out a study to determine how many Oumuamua-like objects could be lurking in deep space, and the results they obtained are mindblowing.
In the study, Loeb and his co-author Carson Ezell, who is another Harvard astronomer found that there could be at least 4,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or 4 quintillion) similar objects in the universe.
According to the study report, each of these objects could be visitors from another star and each, possibly, be artificially created.
"One can use recent rates of detection of interstellar objects and known capabilities to estimate the density of similar objects in the solar neighborhood," Loeb and Ezell wrote in the study report.
A few months back, Loeb had claimed that Oumuamua could have sent sensors to monitor human activities, and these objects could be the unidentified flying objects that perplexed US military officers.
He also made it clear that his new theory is based on a purely imaginative line of reasoning.
The tumbling motion of 'Oumuamua could potentially have been meant to scan signals from all viewing directions. A predecessor to 'Oumuamua could have been a craft that deposited small probes into the Earth's atmosphere without being noticed because it visited before Pan-STARRS started its operations. Along this imaginative line of reasoning, 'Oumuamua could have arranged to appear as coming from the neutral local standard of rest, which serves as the local "galactic parking lot," so that its origin would remain unknown," wrote Loeb in a recent article in the Scientific American.
Meanwhile, NASA has formed a team to study unidentified aerial phenomena. Interestingly, NASA and Pentagon always use the word UAP to describe unknown vessels in the sky, and they have never used the popular terminology UFO to describe these flying objects.
Reports state that the UFO study began on October 24, and it is expected to last for nine months.
As the UFO study continues, conspiracy theorists all across the world strongly believe that these are the primary steps before a possible alien disclosure.