Why 3I/ATLAS Triggered A CIA Non-Answer Despite NASA’s Certainty

This discrepancy did not escape notice. In a recent Medium post, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb posed a question that cuts to the heart of the issue: if 3I/ATLAS is simply a comet, why would the CIA refuse to confirm whether it even maintains records about it? The question is not rhetorical. It highlights a structural tension between public scientific certainty and private risk assessment.

Over the past months, 3I/ATLAS has displayed a collection of behaviors that, while not individually definitive, collectively place it outside the comfort zone of routine comet classification. Observations reported by NASA, ESA partners, and independent astronomers have documented unexpected acceleration components, unusual jet symmetry, persistent activity at heliocentric distances where water-ice sublimation is normally weak, and ultraviolet halo characteristics that differ from textbook expectations. Each of these anomalies has been addressed in isolation. None have been seriously debated in aggregate at the institutional level.