If you listen to Avi carefully, he never claims its alieeens, in fact near the start of the interview he is asked the question directly and he says outright that it's most likely a comet. Although I thought the interviewer was particularly poor in this video. Avi carefully points out the attributes of this particular object that are unusual (particularly the long and relatively narrowly collimated anti-tail, pointing towards the sun) and explains some of the background, 3i/ATLAS being only the third interstellar object we have detected. He is right about needing to maintain our curiosity, be open to new ideas and the need for observation above all as the basis for science, and holding a disdain for blind dogma, under the delusion that we already know everything. There are so many things we don't know, the "unknown unknowns", as he says. And he does a great service to society by getting the general population and especially kids interested in astronomy and science.
I used to love watching the great Patrick Moore in his program "the sky at night" as a kid. It was only on for 15 minutes a week, but in those 15 minutes as a kid I lived amongst the stars. Carl Sagan was similarly inspiring.
Here is Patrick Moore talking about the outer planets in 1975. This is the kind of output the BBC used to produce, when it was a high quality public service broadcaster.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ17fvHnMpk
And here is Patrick talking about the Voyager mission to Saturn in 1980. Patrick says straight away that they learnt more in a week from those Voyager probe observations than in the whole of astronomical history, and I'm sure that is no exaggeration; that is the same point that Avi Loeb is making today, about the importance of making observations of 3i/ATLAS.
As an aside, I still find it incredible that the X-band transmitter on the spacecraft only has a power of 22 W, given the vast distance involved, and that they had that working in 1980; metaphorically speaking it's like trying to view a torch bulb from 1000 miles away. These programs are historical documents today.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-YrIH5AaL4
Sadly Patrick is no longer with us, a great loss to all. I am quite sure that if Patrick was alive today he would be providing regular updates on 3i/ATLAS, and would be interviewing Avi Loeb on his program, much more intelligently than the modern Sky news program did.
