In the dangerous world of global intelligence, some secrets are kept not to keep the truth from coming out, but to keep the peace. On July 1, 2025, the interstellar wanderer 3I/ATLAS flew into our solar system. The Rio Hurtado observatory in Chile saw this happen. NASA scientists were calm and methodical, just like scientists studying a natural event. Because the object was on a hyperbolic path, it would never come back.
It was traveling at a record-breaking 137,000 miles per hour, the fastest speed ever recorded for a visitor like this. But behind the scenes, a much more mysterious story was going on. On Dec. 31, 2025, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that has shocked both scientists and intelligence officials. They won't even say if they are watching the skies for this specific intruder.
The inquiry, lodged by John Greenewald Jr., sought clarity on the agency's monitoring of the object. The CIA's reply was a masterclass in bureaucratic opacity: they could 'neither deny nor confirm the existence or nonexistence of records'. It went further, stating that 'The fact of documents existing or not existing is classified.The fact of the existence or nonexistence of such records is itself currently and properly classified'. This refusal to talk comes despite NASA's decisive declaration on Nov. 19, 2025, where officials insisted 3I/ATLAS is 'definitely a comet of natural origin'.
Is 3I/ATLAS a Looming 'Black Swan' Event?
This divergence in messaging between a transparent space agency and a silent intelligence giant has caught the attention of Avi Loeb, the Baird Professor of Science at Harvard University. Writing in Medium, Loeb suggests that the CIA's silence is a calculated move to manage potential risk.
'The simplest interpretation of the CIA response to the FOIA request is that some government officials wished to verify that 3I/ATLAS is not a black swan event, posing a potential threat to society even as comet experts regard such a possibility as highly unlikely,' Loeb noted.
Loeb argues that the agency is applying a version of Pascal's Wager to planetary defence. He highlighted several 'anomalous' features, including the presence of nickel without iron — a signature often associated with industrial alloys — and a mysterious anti-tail jet pointing directly toward the sun. By multiplying the tiny probability of a threat by the catastrophic impact such a threat would have, the only 'sober conclusion' is that such objects must be monitored with extreme prejudice.
He draws a grim parallel to historical oversights, mentioning the residents of Troy and the Trojan Horse, alongside the intelligence failures of Sept. 11, 2001 and Oct. 7, 2023. For the CIA, missing a 'real wolf' is simply not an option.
Why Intelligence Agencies Are Keeping Quiet on 3I/ATLAS
The motivation for this secrecy, according to Loeb, is the prevention of mass hysteria. If the government were to admit it was seriously investigating an interstellar object as a potential technological threat linked to the 'Dark Forest' theory of cosmic survival, the resulting panic could destabilise financial markets and lead to widespread societal unrest. Under this theory, NASA is encouraged to provide the 'likely scientific interpretation' to keep the public calm, while the CIA's more paranoid investigations remain strictly off the books.
Loeb believes this is the first time the 'neither deny nor confirm' — or Glomar — response has been intentionally applied to an astronomical body. It is, he suggests, a 'wise policy' to avoid crying wolf and losing public trust before a genuine crisis emerges. To settle the matter, the University of California, Berkeley, recently used the Green Bank Telescope as part of the Breakthrough Listen project to scan 3I/ATLAS for 'technosignatures', but found no evidence of transmitters down to 0.1 watts.
As 3I/ATLAS continues its journey out of our system, having passed its closest point to Earth on Dec. 19, 2025 at 167 million miles, the question remains: are we looking at a simple space rock, or is the world's most powerful intelligence agency seeing something the rest of us are not?
