Yes, on the hand...

Sure: Avi's done some great work and is certainly passionate and fascinating! It's never boring listening to him, that's for sure!

But on the other hand, the whole aliens thing has caused some rather strong backlash against him.

Listening to a few hours of interviews of him here and there (including some good ones on John Michael Goddier's channel "Event Horizon"), it seems (to me at least) that Abi's main point about Oumouama is not that it actually is aliens...

But rather he seems to be saying that when we do lots of backflips trying to explain something, and none of the usual explanations or commonly known explanations seem to fit fully in a satisfying way...

Then one of the rational possibilities we should be open to adding to to the list is... aliens!

And he argues that it should not be wrong, stigmatized, or taboo to talk about and consider "aliens" as a possibility sometimes, especially after a lot of the usual stuff and hypothesis doesn't seem to fit the situation well.

His reasoning also seems to be based primarily on that well known idea:

How there is nothing all that special or physics-bending about the chemistry of life on Earth, which is the same chemistry as we've observed across the universe, including pretty much all the variations of carbon chain molecules vital to life, which we can see in lots of places.

So if that chemistry can make life here, and we assume there's nothing all that shockingly special about this solar system, then...

All that sounds fine and reasonable.

I personally agree with him somewhat, sometimes!

But the fact is when you listen to him talk, it's pretty clear he has a distinct bias in favor aliens existing. And he seems to often wonder if the evidence might already be around us.

So ya, in short: he's got a strong bias!

A bias that's fun to contemplate and listen to, but one for which thus far, there isn't a single solidly tangible smoking gun shred of evidence to support the existence of aliens...