The arrival of a strange cigar-shaped asteroid shocked the world because it was the first object to visit our solar system after travelling through interstellar space.

Now a controversial academic has begged the world to ‘join the dots’ after it was claimed this deep space traveller was actually a probe sent by an alien civilisation.

Andrew Potter published an astonishing series of tweets which appeared to link the arrival of the ‘really weird interstellar object that is looking increasingly like some sort of galactic sentry buoy’ with the malfunction of several Nasa spaceships.

Observers were split on whether ‘Oumuamua resembled a cigar, baguette or spliff

Last year, Potter resigned from McGill University in Montreal amid a furore about a controversial article published in Maclean’s which described Quebec as ‘an almost pathologically alienated and low-trust society’.




In his thread, Potter mentioned several events which took place after the sighting of ‘Oumuamua in 2017.

‘Out of nowhere, Donald Trump starts talking about how we need to build a Space Force, pronto,’ he wrote.

Potter goes on to talk about how the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory also shut down in October, whilst Nasa’s main alien-hunting telescope, Kepler, was switched off in the same month after its fuel reserves ran dry.

He also suggested the loss of the Opportunity Mars Rover was somehow linked to ‘Oumuamua and went on to question why the FBI closed down the SunSpot Observatory in September – although he failed to mention that investigators later said they were probing allegations its wifi system had been used to ‘to send and receive child pornography’.

5. LET ME CONNECT THE DOTS FOR YOU pic.twitter.com/598040UJd3 — Andrew Potter (@jandrewpotter) October 31, 2018

‘And of course, the emergency evacuation and 10-day shutdown of the Sunspot Solar Observatory in September was “nothing to panic” about,’ he added.

‘Right. The police tape was merely a precautionary measure.’

Novelist Gareth L Powell also tweeted out a similar suggestion earlier this year, writing: ‘If I was really conspiracy-minded, I’d say the recent closedown by the FBI of the solar observatory in New Mexico was due to the fact they observed Oumuamua changing course on its way out of the solar system.’

Although scientists have come out to dismiss suggestions that ‘Oumuamua was an alien probe, this hasn’t stopped wild online speculation about its origins.

Oumuamua, which is regarded as a ‘new class’ of space object, sped past Earth and looped around our sun at 196,000mph. The strangly shaped object is about half a mile long and is so unusual that Nasa said it had ‘never seen a natural object with such extreme proportions in the solar system before’.

This Nasa graphic shows the distinctive tumbling motion of ‘Oumuamua

The object mysteriously sped-up as it zoomed through the solar system, although scientists are split on whether this was a result of a reaction called ‘outgassing’ in which gas is released as comets are heated by the sun or caused by ‘solar radiation pressure’.

In an academic paper, Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggested the elongated asteroid might have an ‘artificial origin’. ‘

‘Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilisation,’ they wrote.

The researchers suggested that it could be a ‘light sail’ craft which is blown through space by starlight.