The SETI Institute, a group searching for extraterrestrial life, said the interstellar comet 3I/Atlas is natural, with no sign of alien technology. On June 3, 2026, it reported that radio scans by its telescope in Northern California found nothing artificial.

The comet was discovered in the summer of 2025 and identified as a visitor from another star. A few argued, without evidence, that it could be linked to intelligent life. It is only the third known object from another star to enter the solar system, all natural.

In July 2025, just after the discovery, SETI watched the comet for over seven hours, scanning for technosignatures, or signs of technology. It detected nearly 74 million narrow-band signals, but after removing human interference and those matching the comet's movement, only about 200 remained, all from Earth-based technology or nearby satellites. The findings appeared in the Astronomical Journal.

Co-author Valeria Garcia Lopez of Furman University said the results show that today's technology could easily detect such a signal if one were there. "That is why it is important to keep searching for technosignatures, even from objects we might not expect to have signals," she said.

Lead author Sofia Sheikh and her team pointed out that NASA's Voyager probes, launched in the 1970s, will one day drift into other star systems, proving such objects can exist. 3I/Atlas is now nearly 1 billion miles (1.3 billion kilometers) away, never to return, and may be 11 billion years old, twice the sun's age.