When and if alien life is discovered, there’s a high chance the discoverer will be someone who’s spent their career searching for it, rather than someone just stumbling across ironclad proof one fine day.

I’m inclined to let those searchers speculate in public. If society’s rule is that you can’t even speculate about X until you have proof, it will hold back science significantly. History has many such examples of forbidden speculation leading to long delays.

There's been very few interstellar objects he's claimed as alien, in fact only one - and for onomua (or however it was spelt) he also said the most likely outcome would be a natural object. His expedition to recover metal spheroids from the ocean floor was a fascinating one which garnered a lot of support and I believe still had value in devising methods to recover impact materials from underwater.

So really it's the same thing, he gets a lot of aggressive pushback online for mentioning 'aliens', but generally speaking nothing he says or does is actually that baseless.