While I appreciate why Avi Loeb would author an article like this (for those unfamiliar he posited that Oumuamua was of an intelligent alien origin and hence garnered some pushback), it seems a bit ungenerous in spirit to how science is done these days.

He states that extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence so the thesis that skepticism is healthy is still embedded here, however I think he's unwilling to consider (or unconcerned about the idea) that the alien origin claim could very well be misinterpreted/lead credence to a lot of crackpot claims in the lay public which is the source of most of the pushback.

While we do not currently have an explanation for Oumuamua and I cannot intelligently speak on which of the four possibilities mentioned in the article is more likely, communicating science to the lay public is often better done once a theory has been absorbed into the general underpinnings of the larger scientific body of evidence at hand rather than when it is at the precipice to avoid inadvertently misleading people.