Great review of Loeb’s claims. Re the Wow! Signal though, I would just note that the recent analysis update from Mendez et al last August does support it being a real astrophysical signal, not just a glitch.

arxiv.org/abs/2508.10657

Oh, ok. The PASP paper is here:

iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

The authors do say that multiple explanations are possible, and address plate defects further. They’re not saying that all transients in the database must be anomalous, but that some are harder to explain, like ones in alignments.

The authors *did* address at least some of the criticisms of Hambly & Blair in the second PASP paper and even listed their paper in the references section.

That response is from February 2024, long before the 2 new peer-reviewed papers from Villarroel et al came out. They address the criticisms that have been made. And the sigma did go from 21.9 down to 7.6 in the new update, but still above 5. Some other scientists say it deserves investigation. Yes.

They make some interesting points, but I don’t know if any of the people in Metabunk are actually experts on astronomical plate imaging from the 50s? That’s who would be most qualified to assess all this imo.

Me too, I like consistency. 😉

They did that too a while ago at the supermarket nearest me. No layout changes or anything, just where products were placed in different aisles. 🤷‍♂️🙄

Kind of sounds a lot like me! 😉

It’s certainly still possible that there’s an abiotic explanation, but the scientists involved said it’s less likely now with the results in the new (peer-reviewed) paper.

Interesting, thanks!