Alien Object Fly-By?

 Okay, I can't resist, LOL!  I happened to see this while scrolling through older stories at The New York Times online just now.  It's an article about a possible "alien scout" taking a close fly-by of Mother Earth in 2017.

Did an Alien Life-Form Do a Drive-By of Our Solar System in 2017?
By Dennis Overbye
January 26, 2021, updated January 28, 2021

Check out the artist's rendition of what the object may look like, based on radiometric (word?) measurements of the object being approximately ten times longer than it is wide.  So, a sort of flying cigar, I guess. 

An artist’s rendering of Oumuamua. Central to Avi Loeb’s argument is what he calls the
“Oumuamua wager,” a takeoff on Pascal’s famous wager, that the upside of believing in God far
outweighs the downside. Likewise, believing that Oumuamua could have been an alien spacecraft
can only make us more alert and receptive to thinking outside the box.Credit...
M. Kornmesser/European Southern Observatory

This reminded me very much of the alien scout object that visited planet Earth in the film "Star Trek IV:  The Voyage Home," produced in 1986.  Excellent romp with Kirk, a revived and still learning how to be Spock again Spock, Dr. McCoy, Uhuru, Chekov, Sulu, and of course, no continuation of the original "Star Trek" television series from the 1960s (got me hooked for life when I was a teenager) would be complete without Scotty the Engineer!  The action takes place on 1986 planet Earth after a reverse time travel sling around the Sun in order to save two whales from that time and actually SAVE the future planet from the alien thingy that was getting ready to blow us to smithereens because there were no whales on the actual 23rd (24th?) century Earth - they had gone extinct from over-hunting and global climate change.  I know, the time travel schtick is sort of cray cray, but the film was a lot of fun and brought home a very salient point in 1986 that we were already experiencing diminishment and extinctions of irreplaceable species of animals - and such things can always have unanticipated consequences.

Here's the alien scout object from the 1986 Star Trek film:

"Whale probe," Memory Alpha online website.  

"Whale probe," from Fiction to Fact online website. In this image
the probe is going past a 23rd (24th?) CE Space Ship Docking Station on its way
toward Earth.

And now, back to shoveling out of another foot of snow and 2 foot tall drifts.  Sigh.