No zettabyte transmission was ever detected from 3I/ATLAS, or from anywhere else. A dedicated SETI search conducted during the object’s passage found zero radio signals of any kind, a null result this site covered in detail elsewhere, and 3I/ATLAS is now confirmed, through peer-reviewed analysis published in Nature, to be an ordinary ancient comet on its way permanently out of the solar system.
The claim that the United Nations quietly handed alien-contact authority to the Pope in 2022 traces back to a media story from 2010 that the person at its center personally and publicly denied at the time.
3I/ATLAS Is Established as Natural
This site has covered 3I/ATLAS’s actual trajectory and status in detail already, and it’s worth restating the settled facts plainly here. Discovered July 1, 2025, the object reached its closest approach to the Sun on October 30, 2025, just inside Mars’s orbit, and never came closer to Earth than roughly 270 million kilometers at any point, meaning there was never a close pass to “avoid” in the first place. By June 2026, a peer-reviewed study led by Martin Cordiner at NASA Goddard, published in Nature, dated the comet’s material to somewhere between 10 and 12 billion years old, among the oldest objects ever directly studied by astronomers. It’s currently well past Jupiter, fading in brightness, permanently departing the solar system on the same hyperbolic trajectory Newtonian mechanics predicted from the outset. None of the specific claims here, the propulsion-style acceleration, the loitering near Saturn and Jupiter, the probe deployment near the gas giants, appear in any peer-reviewed observation of the object. Multiple spacecraft, including Juice and Psyche, directly observed 3I/ATLAS during its passage and recorded behavior consistent with ordinary cometary outgassing.
The Zettabyte Transmission Has No Source
This deserves a direct answer rather than a hedge: no space agency, radio observatory, or SETI program has reported detecting a data transmission of any kind from 3I/ATLAS. A dedicated search for radio technosignatures conducted during the object’s closest approach found nothing, a specific, published null result, not an absence of searching. A transmission on the scale described, comparable to years of the entire internet’s data output, would also be immediately and independently detectable by dozens of radio observatories worldwide, not something that could remain a rumor confined to a single unnamed report. “Sydney-based astrophysicist Mickey Devlin,” credited here as an independent voice behind the artificial-object hypothesis, doesn’t appear in any searchable astronomical publication, university faculty listing, or news coverage of 3I/ATLAS anywhere. The named, credentialed figure actually associated with the artificial-origin hypothesis is Harvard’s Avi Loeb, whose real, published position has consistently been hedged around a 40 percent probability estimate, not a settled data transfer.
The UN-to-Pope Story Was Denied Fifteen Years Ago
This is worth tracing precisely, since the real story behind it is genuinely well documented. In September 2010, several British tabloids reported that the United Nations was preparing to appoint Malaysian astrophysicist Mazlan Othman, then director of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, as humanity’s official “first contact” representative for extraterrestrial life. The story spread rapidly through international media before anyone checked it against the facts. Othman herself directly and publicly denied it in an email to The Guardian: “It sounds really cool but I have to deny it.” A UN spokesperson separately called the reports “nonsense,” establishing the office’s actual mandate covered near-Earth object policy and space debris coordination, not alien contact protocol of any kind. There was no dedicated alien-contact department established in 2013. There was no closure in 2022, and no transfer of authority to the Vatican. The entire narrative traces to a single debunked 2010 news cycle, and the specific institutional timeline built on top of it here doesn’t correspond to any documented UN action at any point since.
Two Stories Worth Untangling
None of this needs a hidden data archive to stay worth understanding accurately. 3I/ATLAS is a genuinely remarkable, ancient piece of interstellar material, thoroughly studied by multiple spacecraft and established as natural by peer-reviewed analysis, currently leaving the solar system with nothing detected in its wake. The zettabyte transmission traces to no observatory, agency, or publication anywhere. The UN alien-contact department was debunked by the person it was supposedly built around, fifteen years before this year’s version of the story. Separating a genuinely extraordinary natural object from an entirely invented data breach and a recycled decade-old media error is the more accurate story, and considerably less exhausting than waiting for an archive that was never transmitted in the first place.
