Chat?
Of course they’ve come for the whales now.
If they’d come a hundred years ago we’d never have detected the aliens. And if they come a hundred years hence the last whale would have died long ago. So of course they came now. Or at least of course now is when we detect them coming for the whales.
It’s an offshoot of the cetacic principle: We observe a reality that’s consistent with the existence of whales because whales exist. At least until we chop the last one up for sport or science or dinner or whatever. 
If I was King here I think I’d adjust the thread title to be “Found space object proves Avi Loeb loves publicity”.
"Mons Calamari’? Is that Admiral Ackbar’s home planet?
It is, indeed, and the ship that Ackbar was commanding in Return of the Jedi was one of that type.
Pretty cool. It might just be a cool rock though. Sounds like a job for SpaceX.
Perhaps we were supposed to Rendezvous with it?
I see. And does it evade Imperial cruisers by sending out large clouds of black ink?
It deploys fusillades of crunchy, delicious fried seafood rings. 
Nope. It ejects a large tarp.
I have it on good authority that the object is an extraterrestrial coprolite. Apparently, the government is suppressing new Hubble images of an object on an Earthbound trajectory that can only be described as an extra-large roll of Charmin.
gauge bozons, surely
I probably wouldn’t word it that way. The arguement more of a “We don’t currently have another explanation for it, so maybe its aliens.” A bit of a “gods in the gaps argument”. Skimming the paper its mostly just calculations showing that the standard explanations for what it might be fail.
The idea that this might be artificial is only presented in the discussion. Overall, I think the paper would have been better if that had been left out. But without it the paper wouldn’t have hit the mainstream media the way it did, which is undoubtedly why the authors put it in.
NPR’s Science Friday program aired an interview with Avi Loeb last Friday.
Frankly, he came across to me as a bog standard crackpot. He just barely managed to refrain from using the Galileo Gambit, using the Giordano Bruno Variation instead. Because your peers not agreeing that you’ve proved your hypothesis is exactly like being burned at the stake. (Of course, he mangles why Bruno was burned at the stake, but that’s distressingly common among science popularizers).