An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and its walls unguarded.a side effect of questioning what is inside leads to allowing some of what is outside in.
Ellie is someone I would consider having an open mind. She dedicates her work, at great risk to her own career, finding signs of extraterrestrial life. Despite everyone telling her not to waste time and resources on it. But she does and she does it by collecting the evidence first, and when she got it, double and triple checked it before making the announcement.
Avi kind of does the opposite. He hypes his ideas up first, often taking credit for others' work, without sufficient evidence.
Perfect and brutal.
But ask yourself where we'd be if noone ever asked what if.
There's a reason he called his project to observe anomalous phenomenon The Galileo Project. Ring a bell?
Sure, like the Patriot Act was about patriotism.
"What if it's a natural object?" - We're going to observe it.
That's it. It's all we can reasonably do for now. It changes nothing.
But I also think the question "what if it wasn't" is useful to consider.
I'd label anyone unwilling to discuss that topic a crank, not the other way round.
Loeb goes quite a bit further than that.
I've been through the last ~10 or ~15 posts on his Medium this evening, to check. Sentence-by-sentence I don't see anything that goes beyond "what if". Can you share some of the quotes you have in mind?
I think this is an interesting phenomenon, because it seems that lots of people throw personal insults at him (not saying that's you btw) without addressing the meat of whatever they're reacting to.
And lest we forget! One of the founding essays [1] of this very website discusses it: if you're slinging ad hominem attacks or personal insults around, you're by definition losing the "argument" (not that I think this qualifies as an "argument").