Dark comets are a proposed class of curious hybrids between comets and asteroids. These objects show significant non-gravitational accelerations, yet they exhibit absolutely no sign of cometary outgassing in the form of a coma or tail. The first recognized interstellar object, 1I/`Oumuamua, showed these features and was suggested to belong to this class in a recent mainstream publication, posted here. However, based on its inferred flat shape (published here) and non-gravitational acceleration, I argued in a much earlier publication here that 1I/`Oumuamua might be technological in origin. The dark comet categorization of 1I/`Oumuamua and similar solar system objects was the mainstream response to my nontraditional suggestion.

A year ago, I wrote a paper (accessible here) with my postdoc, Richard Cloete, suggesting that the dark Comet labeled 2005 VL1 might be the Venera 2 Spacecraft, a failed Soviet mission to Venus launched in November 1965.

Another member of the proposed class of dark comets in the Solar system is 1998 KY26. The nature of 1998 KY26 is not just an academic question. The Japanese Aerospace eXploration Agency (JAXA) plans to land the spacecraft Hayabusa2 on this object in July 2031. In its original mission, Hayabusa2 explored the 900-meter-diameter asteroid 162173 Ryugu in 2018, returning asteroid samples to Earth in 2020. With fuel remaining, the spacecraft was sent on an extended mission until 2031, when it is set to encounter 1998 KY26. This will be the first time a space mission encounters a tiny object on the size scale of 10-meters. Mainstream astronomers hope that this landing will reveal the nature of outgassing from a dark comet.

1998 KY26 was observed by a number of ground-based telescopes to support the preparation of the Hayabusa2 mission, and the results were reported in a 2025 Nature Communication paper — accessible here.

Interestingly, this so-called `dark comet’ was observed to be shiny with a very high reflectance (albedo) of 0.52 (±0.08). Its inferred size of 11 (±2) meters is comparable to that of a spacecraft. In addition, it exhibits an exceedingly short rotation period of 5.3516 (±0.0001) minutes which implies a sturdy monolithic object, whereas a rubble pile asteroid would break up under the associated centrifugal force.

In a new paper that I just co-authored with the brilliant Adam Hibberd, Adam Crowl, and Carlos Olea (accessible here), we present supporting evidence that 1998 KY26 could be technological in origin. In particular, we identify it as potentially a relic of a historical Russian mission to Mars, the Phobos 1 probe, which suffered a failure 2 months after the launch in July 1988, due to upload of a faulty command.

Our new paper shows that that two propulsive velocity thrusts (∆Vs) combined at 1.9 kilometers per second, the first just after loss of mission and the second in May 1996, allow the orbits and phases of the two bodies to align, with an arbitrarily low separation in velocity-position space. There is also evidence that 1.9 kilometers per second was within the performance envelope of Phobos 1, which had a powerful nitric acid and amine-based autonomous thruster for Mars Orbital Insertion.

Our analysis cannot unequivocally identify that 1998 KY26 is definitely the Phobos 1 probe. Nevertheless, we have shown quantitatively that

1. The Phobos 1 and 1998 KY26 orbits are similar. The two orbits converge and are statistically compatible, given the uncertainty in the orbit of 1998 KY26, which is tightly constrained due to the existence of over 230 observations of this `dark comet’.

2. The difference between these two orbits is compatible energetically with the overall velocity thrust (∆V) envelope available to Phobos 1.

3. There is a historical record in support of the hypothesis that a propulsive velocity thrust (∆V) was delivered shortly after loss of mission.

4. The Phobos 1 mission was lost early on in the probe’s transit to Mars, enabling a large ∆V capability.

5. The observational data on the physical properties of the dark comet 1998 KY26 support the association with Phobos 1. This includes the measured small size, high albedo and unusually large spin, which favors a sturdy object over a rubble pile asteroid.

6. The dark comet appears to be quite elongated based on changes in its apparent magnitude, as expected for Phobos 1.

Gladly, the verdict on our association of the `dark comet’ 1998 KY26 with the spacecraft Phobos 1 will be indisputable once JAXA’s Hayabusa2 mission gets close to it. The beauty of science is that hypotheses can be tested experimentally beyond any reasonable doubt. This is why the Vatican acknowledged publicly in 1992 (as reported here) that Galileo Galilei was right and the Sun is not moving around the Earth as they claimed for centuries. I wonder whether the mainstream of comet experts will acknowledge that 1I/`Oumuamua may have not been a natural `dark comet’ if it becomes clear that their so-called `dark comet’ 1998 KY26 is technological in origin, beyond any reasonable doubt.

My plea to the mainstream of comet experts is simple. Please extend your training data set to include not just rocks and icebergs but also the space objects launched by humans over the past 69 years. After all, we know that the truthfulness of statements made by AI systems depend sensitively on the extent of their training data sets. This is why the U.S. invests in 2026 over 700 billion dollars in data centers for training AI systems. The database on all space objects launched by humans is a rather modest addition to all the asteroids or comets we know about. Is it too much to ask that the assessments of comet experts will be trained on it as well?

On September 17, 2020, Pan-STARRS 1 — the same telescope that discovered 1I/`Oumuamua, identified another near-Earth object which showed non-gravitational acceleration without a cometary tail. Naturally, this object, labeled 2020 SO, would have been classified as another `dark comet’. However, follow-up spectroscopy by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility revealed that its spectrum resembles that of stainless steel, confirming that it is the Centaur upper stage used to launch in September 1966 the Surveyor 2 spacecraft towards the Moon. I rest my case.

2020 SO was pushed away from the Sun by solar radiation pressure, the same mechanism that I proposed in a 2018 publication here as the source of the non-gravitational acceleration of 1I/`Oumuamua. We know that 2020 SO has a technological origin because we launched it. The remaining question is who launched 1I/`Oumuamua?

***

Before my morning jog at sunrise, I heard a voice from the past.

“Hi Avi,

I am reaching out because of your long-standing connection with my grandfather, General James A. Abrahamson.

My husband, author and photographer Casey Fredette, conducted a series of in-depth interviews with Jim. Drawing from those conversations, along with historical records, news articles, and other research, he recently published a book chronicling Jim’s remarkable life and career.

Given your history with him, I would be honored to send you a complimentary copy of the book. I believe you may enjoy revisiting some of the stories and accomplishments that shaped his extraordinary legacy.

Best,
Tiffany Fredette”

to which I replied as follows:

“Dear Tiffany,

So wonderful to hear from you. You made my day! If not for your grandfather, I would not get to where I am.

In case you haven’t seen it already, here is a photo from February 1986 of me (at age 24) explaining results from our SDI project to your grandfather:

I would love to read Casey’s book. Also, please convey my warmest wishes to your grandfather.

With warm regards,
Avi

PS. Here is a brief summary of my career from a bio-sketch related to the above-mentioned photo (where your grandfather is mentioned):

Loeb started his career as an Israeli air force captain in the elite program, Talpiot (1980–1988). He received a PhD in Plasma Physics at age 24 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem while proposing and leading the first international project funded by President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, a.k.a. “Star Wars”). The photo below shows Loeb giving a slide presentation in Israel to the SDI director, General J. A. Abrahamson, in February 1986. This SDI project (on a novel method for propulsion to high speeds using electric energy) brought Loeb for routine visits to Washington DC and eventually in 1988 to a long-term position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he started his career in astrophysics. In 1993 Loeb was hired as an Assistant Professor in the Astronomy department at Harvard University, where he received tenure within three years.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

Professional website:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Social media:

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb

https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb

Below is a transcript of the latest interview I had last night with Natasha Zouves on NewsNation, which is also available in video format here. Natasha’s comments and questions are marked with NZ and my answers are marked with AL.

***

NZ: An incredible viral video shows a meteor crash near an erupting volcano. Take a look at the clip from afarTV on YouTube, available here. You can see the meteor coming down. But what comes next might be much more interesting. Do you see this? This mysterious orb of light seen rising up from the landing site? This volcano is in the Philippines, and this clip is raising so many questions tonight.

Let’s discuss with Professor Avi Loeb, renowned theoretical physicist, Harvard Professor, head of the Galileo Project. Professor Loeb, always a joy to see. So good to see you again. I want to bring up the footage again, as you can walk us through what we’re seeing here.

What do you see in the video and what goes through your mind here?

AL: Thank you so much for having me, Natasha. We see a strike of a meteor, not at the volcano but behind it. The white light source rising up to the right of the volcano is most likely the glint from a satellite that reflects sunlight. There are more than 10,000 communication satellites moving around the Earth, so it’s not very unlikely to see such a coincidence.

NZ: So, you think that these are completely unrelated, that this rising light is not originating from the meteorite. It is literally an unrelated satellite that is reflecting sunlight.

AL: Right. The rising white light is moving along a straight line as expected for a satellite.

NZ: So, in your opinion, this is not a UFO.

AL: No. What people label as UFOs is obviously a mixed bag. Most of the time, these are phenomena that are related to human-made objects or natural phenomena as we are discussing. In this case, we have a combination: the meteor is a natural phenomenon, and the satellite is human made.

When considering UFOs, the challenge is to characterize the object enough to rule out the possibility that it’s human made or natural.

NZ: So, it’s just a coincidence that the rising white light seems to be following almost that exact same reverse path.

AL: Right. As of now, satellites pose a major issue for astronomical observations, because they shine light in the night sky. There are lots of streaks that are observed in exposures from astronomical observatories. That’s a major issue, because astronomers used to go away from city lights, but now there are city lights in the sky.

NZ: Very interesting and well put.

I want to get your take on this as well. It’s now being reported that White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, discussed amnesty for UAP whistleblowers with Congressman Eric Burleson, who was proposing a 60-day window for those with information to come forward. I assume that you think this is important.

AL: It’s very important, because so far, in the two batches that were released of UFO videos, images, and documents, the data was not good enough for us to identify any object of extraterrestrial origin. Presumably, there would be much more information available from people who work within the government, that have knowledge of higher quality data. In particular, whether there are any materials from crash sites, as David Grusch suggested in his testimony in Congress. In fact, David Grusch will be involved in a public event, announced here, that will take place on Tuesday, June 9 at 1PM ET, where he and Representatives Burlison, Moskowitz, Luna, and Burchett, will discuss this topic.

The fundamental question is whether there is classified information or materials that were delegated to corporations such as Lockhead Martin or MITRE, that are of much higher significance. Giving amnesty to whistleblowers would be fundamental in allowing this information to get to the public.

NZ: Yes, absolutely. I’ll be speaking with Congressman Burchett tomorrow, so we’ll be discussing that as well.

Let me ask you one more thing in the time we have left. There is also this theory going around that the CIA is monitoring certain ancestry or genetic type test websites for genetic markers that could help identify potential aliens living among us. What are your thoughts on this? Is this a real possibility or just another wild theory?

AL: It’s possible that some people are speculating, but I think it’s extremely unlikely extraterrestrial biological beings share our DNA, because our DNA is a relatively recent phenomenon here on Earth. The human species existed only for the past few million years. Before that, terrestrial DNA looked different among other species on Earth.

All forms of life on Earth have a DNA with one chirality, a specific orientation of their double-helix molecular structure. Terrestrial DNA is right-handed. If aliens come here even with the same DNA building blocks, it’s not clear whether their double helix would be organized in a right-handed or left-handed configuration. Obviously, we should not shake their hands, let alone have babies with them. Our body is not protected from the diseases of left-handed DNA. The encounter would pause a health risk for us.

All in all, I would argue it’s very unlikely to encounter DNA from another star that matches specific life forms on Earth.

NZ: We shot a couple of full podcast episodes together, Professor Loeb, and that’s one of the things I remember. If you ever meet an alien, never shake its hand. That’s what you told me. I’m keeping that top of mind. Professor Avi Loeb, always a joy. Thank you so much.

AL: Thanks for having me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

Professional website:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Social media:

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb

https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb

At the opening lines of his book “The Myth of Sisyphus”, accessible here, Albert Camus wrote:

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards.”

Over the past half-century, the mainstream of theoretical physics focused on “whether or not the world has three dimensions,” within the attempt of string theory to unify quantum mechanics and gravity by adding 6 to 22 spatial dimensions. As Albert Camus realized before string theory was conceived, this mathematical exercise did not help us understand whether our life is worth living. Similarly, the use of artificial intelligence to explore the categories of the human mind will also not bring us to Camus’ promised land.

So, lets follow Camus’ lead and ask: What would give meaning to human existence in the 21st century?

Numerous philosophers and lifestyle influencers addressed this question. They pointed out that having human friends, maintaining a healthy diet, and sleeping 6–8 hours (as advised in a new Nature study here) promote human happiness and longevity. But I know personally many billionaires who have lots of friends, eat healthy food and sleep well, yet they are desperate to find a higher purpose and meaning to their life.

No, occupying Mars will not give a deep meaning to Elon Musk’s life, nor to the life of his followers. Mars is just another rock like Earth which unfortunately lost its atmosphere about 4 billion years ago. It used to have liquid water reservoirs in the form of oceans, lakes and rivers, on its surface more than 3 billion years ago. Back then, terrestrial travel agencies could have advertised its ecosystem as a desirable tourist destination. But right now, it is a desert with temperature swings between day and night in the range of +60 and -150 degrees Celsius, a cosmic-ray intensity that is 50 times higher than on Earth, and a surface gravity that is 38% of that on Earth. Space cowboys who are intrigued by wild-west ambitions of conquering virgin territories, should keep in mind the health risks imposed by these harsh conditions which are far more life-threatening than early Americans faced. With current transportation technologies, travelers to Mars will lose about 20% of their bone density on their trip from Earth to Mars because of the low gravity encountered during their trip. Making humanity a multi-planet civilization by going to Mars is equivalent to safeguarding your housing opportunities by buying a second home in the South Pole. Without proper precautions, traveling to Mars is akin to committing suicide. Elon Musk said: “I’d like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.” Camus’ question remains unanswered by this statement.

If traveling to Mars will not answer Camus’ question, what else can do it?

I had been practicing astrophysics research for forty years and studied all the data we collected within our cosmic horizon, extending out to 46.5 billion light years if we account for cosmic expansion over the past 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang.

Based on all that I have learned, let me state unequivocally that Ecclesiastes 1:9 got it wrong when he stated:

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

In fact, the Sun did not exist for the first two thirds of cosmic history and it will die in 7.6 billion years. There is certainly `something new under the Sun’. The graveyard of dead stars in the Milky-Way galaxy implies that `what has been will not be again, and what has been done will not be done again’. Death breaks the symmetry between the past and the future. In fact, stars with more than tens of times the mass of the Sun live for only a few million years and collapse to black holes. They turn into prisons of spacetime from where even light cannot escape. The Event Horizon Telescope (within Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, for which I served as the founding director) imaged the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky-Way — into which astronauts can enter but never share their experiences on social media. Both Ecclesiastes and Elon Musk are not helpful in finding meanings to human life.

After forty years of studying the physical Universe, I now realize that my two cosmology textbooks (here and here) — currently vetted by the Webb telescope, described the cosmos merely as a collection of matter and radiation. Indeed, cosmologists view the observable cosmic volume as a lonely place which does not add meaning to human existence. Astronomers are merely spectators, observing the vast expanse of the cosmos through telescopes. They often assume that nobody looks back at them.

But suppose, for a moment, that there are numerous observers out there looking back at us. After all, the latest census of exoplanets implies that there are billions of Earth-Sun analogs in the Milky-Way galaxy. Assuming that we are unique is arrogant. Instead, the most plausible hypothesis is that similar initial conditions lead to similar outcomes. Since most stars formed billions of years before the Sun, we are late to the cosmic stage. The primary obligation of astronomers must therefore be to find technological signatures of intelligent actors that predated us.

Given this perspective, it is completely unreasonable for the mainstream of astronomy to focus its funds on the search for microbes — as done in the 2020 Decadal Survey of Astronomy & Astrophysics. Why is common sense not common in academia?

Finding intelligent cosmic partners will be the most consequential discovery for the future of humanity, because it will give a new answer to Camus’ question. If we find an alien civilization which is more accomplished than we are, we might learn from it new science and technologies. This could allow us to travel more efficiently and satisfy Musk’s ambition of making humanity a multi planet civilization without compromising on the hazardous housing conditions on Mars. But most importantly, discovering intelligent extraterrestrials could give us an emotional connection to the otherwise lonely cosmos, and inject new insights into the meaning of our life in the cosmos.

Following the logic of Blaise Pascal’s Wager about God (as described here), we must take the possible existence of a higher alien intelligence seriously because its existence could have a huge impact on our future.

Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg is known for his bleak view of the universe. In his 1977 book “The First Three Minutes,” he famously wrote:

“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

Steven referred to the `physical universe’ on which his book focused. He missed the possibility of superhuman intelligence beyond Earth. If we discover the products of advanced extraterrestrials, we would realize that `the more the Universe seems comprehensible, the more meaningful our life would be.’ This would reflect the power of super-human intelligence. We are probably not at the top of the food chain, cosmologically speaking. Learning from those who are wiser than we might give a meaning to our existence.

It appears that Albert Camus, Elon Musk, Ecclesiastes, Steven Weinberg and many other distinguished thinkers, all missed the possibility that we might derive a meaning to our life from superhuman intelligence in outer space. There is nothing more worthy of the billions of dollars that we allocate to space exploration, than the search for superhuman intelligence out there.

The new insights from advanced extraterrestrials were likely gained over billions of years of cosmic history. Benefitting from the wisdom of our cosmic elders, we should value those who had a thousand times longer history than the human species.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

Professional website:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Social media:

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb

https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb

In November 2025, I was stunned to find AI-generated video channels on YouTube showing me saying things that I do not approve of. An even bigger source of distress was the realization that some of these videos garnered a million views within a few days.

This finding was worse than the misinformation and antisemitic hate spread a few months earlier in two YouTube videos created by an influencer, who suggested that my scientific practice as a Harvard professor is a fraud while at the same time labeling himself on his YouTube channel as “Professor Dave” — even though he never held a professorship, nor did he ever receive a PhD. Since his statements were “not even wrong” in the words of Wolfgang Pauli, they were of little concern to me. The irritation caused by this fake “Professor” felt as insignificant as a mosquito bite. However, the fake AI-generated videos, spreading misinformation in my voice and appearing in my image on the background of my office, felt more like a punch in the face. Both misinformation campaigns were motivated by the desire of their creators to make money out of my public fame.

My pain from the AI punch was exacerbated when an 83 old ecologist, named Abby Rockefeller (daughter of David Rockefeller), came to my Harvard office to tell me that she was extremely impressed by the content of one of the AI-generated videos and so she shared it with her friend group, only to be told by one of them that it was fake. Following this emotional rollercoaster, Abby was deeply frustrated not only by the fact that she was fooled by AI, but also because she wanted to believe the misinformation conveyed in the video.

Could AI trigger a misinformation instability in society by generating content that appeals to its consumers more than the truth? This would be akin to feeding the public with intellectual junk food that tastes good but is unhealthy to the mind.

Today, I attended an insightful WORLD.MINDS forum coordinated by Rolf Dobelli who hosted the brilliant German journalist Mathias Döpfner, chairman and CEO of Axel Springer SE.

My question to Mathias started with an analogy. The old world order involving the U.S. and the former Soviet Union was stabilized by the fear from mutual annihilation in a nuclear war. The existence of nuclear weapons created a stable geopolitical equilibrium because both sides wanted to survive. However, such an equilibrium is unstable if one side values martyrdom — in which case mutual annihilation does not pose a deterrence. This is the primary rationale for denying Iran access to nuclear weapons.

In the same vein, traditional truth-seeking reflected a stable equilibrium in the old world order of journalism, where evidence-based vetting was valued much more than engagement with the largest number of subscribers. In the current social media climate, where content creators gain more subscribers by spreading hate and misinformation, conspiracy theories thrive. But to all of us who value the truth, the misinformation spread by human influencers feels like a mosquito bite because their content is “not even wrong”. I explained the clear difference between evidence-based scientific research and social media in a recent essay, posted here.

However, the AI campaign of misinformation poses a much bigger danger. The reason is simple. AI can intelligently optimize misinformation by creating the ideal recipe of intellectual junk food. Once AI becomes more intelligent than its customers, members of the friend group of Abby Rockefeller will not be able to warn her about misinformation because they will all be fooled like she was.

In particular, I wonder how many scientific papers are already being published in scientific journals today with false AI-generated content, in which either the data or its interpretation is fabricated. The way to find out is to attempt to reproduce their data or interpretation. After all, the Sun did not start to move around the Earth just because the Vatican published the notion that the Earth is at the center of the Universe. The physical reality is independent of what influencers say about it and it is our duty as scientists to use experimental data in vetting what it is.

I therefore asked Mathias whether AI might break the stable equilibrium of truth-seeking journalism because readers might prefer to consume fake content which is more appealing to them. Just as with nuclear weapons, the old world order could be destabilized by a different value system of the humans involved.

Matthias assured me that most people are truth seekers and will reject the temptation of AI misinformation. I hope he is right. Until we find evidence for extraterrestrial technological civilizations, there is always the possibility that they died from self-inflicted misinformation wounds.

Finding technological signatures of alien civilizations is now more urgent in my mind as a practicing astrophysicist, because it will bring relief to my existential concerns about the future of humanity in the age of AI misinformation.

Speaking for myself, my peace of mind rests on scientific evidence both on Earth and in the Universe at large.

***

Before my morning jog at sunrise, I had received the following uplifting message:

“Hi Dr. Loeb,

I’m an 8th grade science teacher, and one of my students wrote you a thank you note for your research. Thank you for everything you do to continue to inspire young scientists. Have a great day!

Beth

Letter Pasted Below:

Dear Dr. Loeb,

I am an 8th grade student from Western Sierra Collegiate Academy. This email that I have written is to appreciate and thank you for your research and work regarding the Galileo Project. I recently came across your work on the “Chemical Classification of Spherules Recovered from The Pacific Ocean Site of The CNEOS 2014–01–08 (IM1) Bolide” (published here).

When I read it, I was captivated by what I learned and what discoveries you made at that site. It is really astounding to learn how many spherules exhibit elemental ratios that are distinct from known planetary bodies and how their origins are undetermined.

Thank you for your dedication and hard work in finding out how the “BeLaU”-type spherules chemical composition is unlike any known solar system material.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Tanishkaa Raju”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

Professional website:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Social media:

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb

https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb

Below is a set of cosmos-wide set of questions (marked in boldface), posed to me today by a reporter in Athens, Greece, along with my answers.

***

We are living in an era of wars, climate crisis, political polarization and technological acceleration. As someone who spends his life looking at the cosmos, how do you make sense of this particular moment in human history? What kind of era do you think we are living in?

We are approaching a major revolution in human history. The exponential growth of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and the potential discovery of alien intelligence could make our future completely different than our past.

Discovering that we are not the only technological civilization in our cosmic neighborhood resembles hearing a knock on the door by a neighbor. Hopefully, the outside perspective will quiet down the loud arguments among our family members on Earth.

The recognition that we are not alone holds the potential of changing our priorities from conflicts to cooperation among all humans on Earth. We are all in the same boat when dealing with interstellar visitors. At the same time, it is important to make sure that no passenger within our boat acts irresponsibly because such behavior affects all of us.

The Galileo Project is now five years old. What have you learned that you didn’t expect to learn when you started it?

The research team of the Galileo Project had monitored millions of objects in the sky and learned that the vast majority of them are human made or natural phenomena. We are seeking rare outliers to these categories. Even if one object is extraterrestrial, it would be the biggest discovery that humanity ever made. We only need to find one. That particular object could inform us of new science and technology that we do not possess, as well as better our geopolitical priorities on Earth and ambitions in space.

You recently announced that the Project can now measure distances to objects in the sky with better than 10% accuracy, using multiple observatories separated by 10 kilometers. What does this mean in practical terms for your research?

The ability to triangulate objects by observing them from three different directions is a new feature that the Galileo Project employs in Nevada, where we have three observing units separated apart by 10 kilometers. This allows us to infer position, velocity and acceleration of each object in three dimensions. From a single vantage point, a nearby object — like a bug or a bee, may appear to be large or cross the sky fast even though it moves at a relatively low speed. The UFO files released by the Pentagon over the past month do not provide distance information. As a result, it is impossible to conclusively determine whether any of the recorded objects moves outside the performance envelope of human-made technologies, like balloons, drones or airplanes.

After the release of the UFO files in May 2026, your team concluded that none of the objects requires an exotic origin. Were you disappointed by that — or relieved?

I would like to know the nature of all anomalous objects in the sky. In that context, I was disappointed by the lack of sufficient information to make this determination. We are left with uncertainty and need higher quality scientific data.

The good news is that we do not need to wait for the government to tell us what lies in the sky. We can simply look up. This is what the Galileo Project under my leadership is doing by employing state-of-the-art instrumentation and computers.

The government has better quality data, for example from the fleet of satellites that it employs to image the Earth at high spatial resolution of a few centimeters, but such data was declassified as of yet.

Does Oumuamua still occupy your thinking, or have you moved on to other hypotheses?

As a scientist, I am driven by data. The most interesting data carries anomalies which potentially flag new knowledge. Unfortunately, we have acquired limited data on the first recognized interstellar object, 1I/`Oumuamua, which left us in 2017 with uncertainty about its nature. It was most likely a flat object with an extreme shape based on the fact that the amount of sunlight it reflected changed by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling every 8 hours. In addition, it was pushed away from the Sun by a mysterious force, without showing any evidence for cometary outgassing. I proposed that this force was simply a result of the reflection of sunlight, which meant that the object is very thin. Three years later, another object named 2020 SO was discovered by the same telescope in Hawaii. This one was definitely pushed by reflecting sunlight. Within a few months, 2020 SO was identified as an upper stage of a lunar lander mission by NASA — launched in 1966. We know it is technological and made of thin walls because we launched it. The question is who launched 1I/`Oumuamua?

1I/`Oumuamua’s anomalies intrigued me to study in detail subsequent interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS which was discovered in 2025. Shortly after 3I/ATLAS was reported to move in the orbital plane of the planets around the Sun to within 4.88 degrees, I defined the Loeb Classification Scale which ranks an interstellar object that is definitely of natural origin (namely, a natural rock or iceberg) as 0 and an object that definitely represents alien technology and poses a threat to humanity as 10. I ranked the anomalies of `I/`Oumuamua and 3I/ATLAS as 4 on the Loeb Scale, as they feature anomalies that are intriguing but insufficient to lead to the conclusion that they represent alien technology.

The Pacific expedition retrieved materials from the 2014 interstellar meteor IM1. What exactly did you find, and why do you consider it significant?

We recovered molten droplets, less than a millimeter in size, from the crash site of the interstellar meteor IM1 and found that a tenth of them have a chemical and isotopic composition that deviate from solar system materials and are most likely extrasolar. If true, this is the first time that scientists studied in a laboratory the materials from a large object that arrived from outside the solar system.

If IM1 or Oumuamua were proven to be of artificial origin, what would change for humanity and what wouldn’t?

Discovering alien technology would change our perspective about our place in the Universe and inspire us to invest more in space exploration. We might be tempted to visit the backyard of those who sent probes to our backyard. Religious people would realize that God is not a parent who attends to a single child. The conceptual revolution will take time to affect the mindset of all people on Earth. Some may continue their daily routines and obsession with earthly matters for years after the discovery.

Most of your academic colleagues continue to treat your research with skepticism. Does that hurt you, or does it drive you?

I learned to ignore the audience. Good basketball players keep their eyes on the ball, not the audience.

Is there a line between scientific courage and scientific irresponsibility — and who gets to draw it?

Of course. Scientific progress is driven by paying attention to anomalies in data. It requires childlike curiosity. Scientific irresponsibility is to engage for decades in a belief system that cannot be tested by collecting data on the physical reality that we all share. You might think that I am referring to religious cults, but I am actually referring to the mainstream of the physics community which contemplated in recent decades the untestable concepts of string theory or the multiverse.

You often say that science must follow the data wherever it leads. But data requires interpretation. Where does the scientist’s subjectivity begin?

Subjectivity begins in what the science community regards as worth the effort of data collection. It took four decades between the suggestion made by the astronomer Otto Struve to search for Jupiter-mass planets close to Sun-like stars and the discovery of the hot Jupiter 51-Pegasi b because observers decided not to waste their time in search for such systems. Revolutionary data requires the willingness to collect it. The lack of curiosity by risk-averse gatekeepers is what suppresses innovation in science.

Doing science by consensus is bad for progress, because the beaten path might lead towards a dead end. An example is supersymmetry which was adopted by the mainstream of theoretical physics and not discovered in its natural parameter space by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

If extraterrestrial intelligence exists, why do you think it hasn’t communicated with us in an unambiguous way? What is the most compelling explanation you have?

We may not be interesting to them. We tend to think that they care about us for the same reason that we believed that we are at the center of the Universe.

Instead of thinking about ourselves as the focus of cosmic attention, we should seek more accomplished partners. For our blind date with interstellar partners, we should aim high and not low. Instead of searching for the most abundant and mediocre dating partners in the form of primitive lifeforms like microbes, the mainstream of the astronomy community should search for beings who are more intelligent than we are.

The Fermi Paradox remains unanswered. Which version of it do you find most plausible today?

They might be right here. We have not done a proper search in our cosmic backyard.

If it were proven that we are not alone in the universe, would that be good news or bad news for humanity?

It would definitely be good news, akin to finding a more accomplished sibling in our family of intelligent beings. We might be jealous of their accomplishments, but at the same time — they might inspire us to do better.

You studied philosophy before turning to physics. How much has philosophy shaped the way you do science?

I am interested in the most fundamental questions about our existence. As a scientist, I narrow down this set of questions to those that we can answer by collecting data.

You have written that curiosity matters more than certainty. In a world that demands quick answers, how do you teach tolerance for uncertainty?

Uncertainty is the most common condition in practicing science. We have to live with it because our knowledge is an island in an ocean of ignorance. The science influencers who give us a false sense of certainty through papers or social media posts might be guiding us in the wrong direction. In 1894, the physicist Albert A. Michaelson argued that physics is over and what remains is measuring the constants of nature to the fifth decimal point. This was a decade before Special Relativity revolutionized our concept of spacetime, two decades before gravity was interpreted by General Relativity as the curvature of spacetime and three decades before Quantum Mechanics revolutionized the way we view the physical reality.

If you could send a single message to an extraterrestrial intelligence, not a scientific one, but a human one, what would you say?

“Where is the nearest hub of intelligent civilizations?”

Outside the laboratory and beyond the telescopes, what do you love most in life? Not the scientist, not the professor. The person. What truly matters to you?

I love my family and enjoy nature. I jog 5 kilometers every morning before sunrise, in the company of birds, wild turkey, bunnies and ducks. If AI will bring us to a catastrophic singularity, I plan to disconnect from the internet and live in harmony with nature.

On warm summer nights, when you step outside and look up at the stars, what goes through your mind? Not the scientist’s thoughts. The human ones.

The stars of the Milky-Way galaxy which streams through the Local Group look to me like lights from the cabins of a giant spaceship sailing through space. I often wonder whether there are other passengers in these cabins.

You were born in Israel, you served in the Israeli army, and you have spent your career at Harvard looking for common ground between humanity and the cosmos. How do you carry that tension, between a world that keeps dividing itself and a universe that knows no borders?”

I ignore the limitations of the current human activities on Earth and focus on what will be remembered in the history books of the Milky-Way galaxy within billions of years from now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

Professional website:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Social media:

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb

https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb

Below is a transcript of the latest interview I had last evening with Jesse Webber Live on NewsNation, which is also available in video format here. Jesse’s comments and questions are marked with JW and my answers are marked with AL.

***

JW: Imagine taking a DNA test and finding out you’re not from where you thought you were, right? Maybe you grew up thinking you were Italian, but most of your DNA comes back as French. It happens all the time. But now I want you to imagine you’re not from the planet you thought you were from.

Maybe you already knew that. I know that sounds like science fiction, but the possibility is gaining a lot of traction in some UFO circles. Because on a recent podcast, science fiction writer and philosopher Jason Reza-Jorjani says he was told about a secret CIA program by former U.S. Army Sergeant Lyn Buchanan. And Buchanan seemingly claims that he’s a psychic spy who worked for the government’s remote viewing program during the Cold War and was approached by a group of Aliens known as the Nordics who have been hiding out in plain sight living quietly in small American towns. At least they’re hiding out for now. Because according to Jorjani, Buchanan claims a UAP researcher named Christopher “Kit” Green, a CIA analyst, believes he may have found a way to identify these secret aliens by searching for a specific non-human or hybrid genetic marker inside DNA databases like Ancestry and 23andMe. And on the pie chart listing ethnicities, there’s something sometimes called a wedge. It’s called “other”, which means unknown, unidentifiable. So, UFO theorists believe that could mean extraterrestrial.

Now, to be clear, I get it. I know this all sounds unbelievable, right? And yes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But as new UAP files continue to be released by the Pentagon, is it fair to at least ask whether some of these things that we once laughed off may deserve some serious scientific scrutiny?

You know who I’m bringing in: Avi Loeb, astrophysicist. Harvard professor, one of the leading voices pushing for a fact-based, evidence-first approach to the search for life beyond Earth.

Avi, always good to see you. Happy to separate fact from fiction. Is this a real thing?

AL: Thanks for having me. I don’t think it’s very likely to be a real thing. It’s possible that a CIA analyst or anyone else might have been curious about this question, but there is no scientific basis to lend any credibility to this possibility. Because, first of all, for biological beings to travel interstellar distances, requires a very unusual genetic engineering. As far as we know, these trips — even at the speed of light — would take tens of thousands of years. And they are very hazardous because of bombardment by cosmic rays and low gravity. Humans cannot survive for more than a few years on the surface of the Moon or Mars.

JW: I guess the question is, is there a genetic marker that you could search for, potentially?

AL: Regarding the origin of our species, of course there could be paths that led to humans that are not fully recognized. That definitely is possible. And you could also have markers within the DNA that indicate some effect of transfer of primitive forms of life from, let’s say, Mars to Earth, in a process called panspermia (as discussed here). You can imagine situations like that.

But the DNA is not necessarily universal throughout the cosmos. The kind of genetic code we find nowadays in humans was very different in the past history of Earth. If you go back a few billion years on Earth, there weren’t even complex cells with nuclei; eukaryotic genesis introduced nuclei in cells where the DNA is packaged. It only came about 2–3 billion years ago on Earth. That happened at roughly half the age of the Earth. Having someone visit us with similar DNA characteristics is extremely unlikely. There is also the possibility of chirality — the way the double-helix of the DNA is organized, being a mirror image of what we have. In that case, it would be catastrophic for us to even touch such beings, because we are not protected from their diseases (as discussed here). I recommend not shaking the hand of an alien if you find one.

JW: I’ll keep that in mind. Well, so the Nordic supposedly look like us, what do you make of that?

AL: There are Nordic people on Earth, right? Obviously, you can find them in crash sites of fighter jets or in battlefields. There could be a government program for retrieval and reverse engineering of materials from aircrafts that were manufactured by adversarial nations and some of them may be Nordics, while others may be of another ethnic origin.

The whole idea that there are four species of aliens visiting us is a rumor that possibly came out of retrieving pilots from crash sites that belong to different nations on Earth. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that indeed we’re dealing with beings that somehow mingled with humans and made babies out of that. That is ridiculous. [A more reasonable possibility is that an alien probe might capture lifeforms on Earth and 3D-prints versions of then that are recovered in crash sites.]

JW: You know what it is, Avi? Nobody trusts the government. So, this idea that they’re secretly looking through ancestry sites to try to map out if they’re extraterrestrials, I think that’s a part of this as well, right? Is the government being transparent?

AL: It may well be that someone in government had the idea of checking. That’s quite possible. But that idea itself is highly questionable, scientifically speaking. So, I would say this person, who thought about the idea of checking the DNA, is not very credible, scientifically speaking.

But more generally, there may well be evidence for extrasolar materials, and other information that the government holds under wraps. And these clues may be in corporations like Lockheed Martin, like MITRE. Yesterday, Representative Burlinson asked MITRE publicly here to respond to a related disclosure request.

So, yes, we should check what the government knows and help them figure things out as much as possible, because — apparently — they’re at a loss if they’re asking for DNA information of this nature.

JW: Something to think about. Avi Loeb, thank you so much for separating fact from fiction for us. I always appreciate it. Good seeing you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

Professional website:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Social media:

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb

https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb

Below is a transcript of the latest interview I had last evening with Al Arabiya English (AAE), the official English-language digital platform of Saudi-Arabia state-owned international news channel, available in video form here. AAE’s comments and questions are marked with AAE and my answers are marked with AL.

***

AAE: We’re joined now by Dr. Avi Loeb, who is a theoretical physicist and professor of science at Harvard University. He’s also the author of Interstellar, the search for extraterrestrial life and our future in the stars.

In fact, Dr. Loeb, it seems you’ve written numerous books on astrophysics and cosmology. I’d like to start by asking you, out of all of these files that have been released, there’s been audio files, videos, photos, some of them dating back to 1948, which ones have you found to be most thrilling?

AL: Well, I felt like a kid in a candy store because as a scientist, our conception of reality should be driven by evidence. And here is a trove of data that the U.S. government collected about objects that they cannot identify. The Pentagon and the intelligence agencies cannot figure out the nature of some of these objects.

I found most interesting a black sphere that was moving through the clouds. It didn’t look like a drone. It could be a balloon. We don’t have a good assessment of its speed because we don’t know the distance to it. There was also an object that accelerated very quickly, much faster than you expect from a drone. But again, without knowing the distance, we can’t infer the actual value of the acceleration. There was a report by a senior intelligence officer from last year who went on a mission with a helicopter to identify an object and saw a swarm of orbs and other unusual phenomena there. That’s a testimony, not data from instruments. The question is whether he was looking at human-made drones, perhaps by adversarial nations. This illustrates the fact that these reports imply that the U.S. intelligence agencies are not doing a perfect job. They cannot identify objects that are potentially human-made, and that’s a serious national security concern. So, it’s a serious matter, and the question is how to resolve the nature of these objects.

If any of them is from outside of this Earth, of course, it’s the biggest discovery ever made by humanity.

AAE: Dr. Loeb, the images that some people are particularly excited about relate to what appears to be footage of a UFO being shot out of the sky to pieces. I don’t know if you saw that one, but what’s your explanation for that?

AL: That one is well understood. It’s a balloon. It was discovered shortly after the Chinese spy balloon was shot down. This one may be of civilian origin. We don’t know because the pieces landed in a place that was difficult to reach. But it was clearly a balloon.

There are also reports by astronauts that can be easily explained. For example, Buzz Aldrin spoke about flashes of light. Those can be introduced by high-energy charged particles, namely cosmic rays, that entered his eyeballs. The intensity of cosmic rays on the Moon or on the way to the Moon is 200 times larger than on the ground on Earth because we are protected by the blanket of the atmosphere and the magnetosphere — the magnetic field of the Earth, shielding us from these cosmic rays. There were also some lights in the photographs taken by the astronauts on the surface of the Moon. But I found that there are similar lights also in parts of the film of the Kodak camera that were not exposed to the lens of the camera. So clearly these are related to cosmic-rays and nothing else.

So, all in all it’s a mixed bag, but it’s a serious matter in the sense that some objects here on Earth are not being identified, and potentially they’re used for espionage or other military purposes. Many of them are found in military contexts like war zones, which are places where there are many eyes on the sky, many sensors looking around, and that’s where you expect to find objects that are not identified because they represent technologies that are not known to the intelligence agencies.

AAE: Dr. Loeb, it sounds like you’ve got a rational explanation for a number of the phenomena that were reported and released in these files. Doesn’t sound like you’ve seen anything that sounds like conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial life therefore.

AL: That’s correct. But, you know, just like seeking a marriage partner for life, you just need one. So, I think it’s worthwhile for scientists like myself to go through the data. In fact, there may be even better data released in the future and we can see if one in a million of the unidentified technological objects happens to be not human-made.

That would be an amazing discovery as it will change our perception about our place in the universe. We would realize that we are not at the top of the food chain, cosmologically speaking. Apparently, there is a visitor that was sent by a more accomplished technological civilization than we are, because they reached our backyard before we reached their backyard. And so, that motivates me. I’m not wasting my time because at the very least, I’m helping the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies figure out what such objects might be. So, I do think it’s the obligation of scientists to engage with such data that looks anomalous and figure out what it means. It’s like a detective story.

AAE: Do you think President Trump was right to go down this sort of transparency route? Should these files be released?

AL: I think so. I believe there was resistance to release them because it shows the vulnerability of the U.S. defense system if these unidentified objects are made by adversarial nations. Also, some of the data was collected by classified sensors and you don’t want to expose the abilities of those sensors to adversarial nations. But, on top of that, there is of course the psychological tendency of bureaucrats or administrators within government to hide the fact that they’re not doing their job. And they can do that by classifying documents and data. The U.S. defense budget in 2026 is close to a trillion dollars and yet they are unable to identify some objects in the sky. That’s embarrassing and that’s the reason for them to keep it under wraps. And I do think that exposing that failure to identify objects is important because it will bring the U.S. to a better place. At the very least, it brings this subject of unusual objects to the forefront of the public discourse and the scientific mainstream.

But my hope is that if there is something that came from outside of Earth, it will be unraveled in this process. And the best we can do is to collect new data rather than be obsessed with past reports because we can’t go back in time and check exactly the circumstances. A better approach is to use the best available sensors we have right now and look at the sky and we don’t need to wait for the government to tell us what’s in the sky. That’s the approach that I’m taking with the Galileo Project that I’m leading at Harvard University. We built three observatories. We monitor the entire sky at all times in these three locations. We collect data on millions of objects. And frankly, any object that is human-made is boring as far as I’m concerned. We’re looking for outliers that move outside the performance envelope of human-made technologies.

AAE: Some of the older files in this dossier date back to the 1940s. Could you perhaps now with the Artificial Intelligence technology we have today finally debunk them or explain them?

AL: AI cannot improve the quality of the data. The subject gets more attention now because the detections are more significant as we have better sensors, better cameras. Just look at the Artemis II images that were taken of the Moon with the latest cameras compared to those used by the Apollo astronauts half a century ago. Obviously, the images are far better and we don’t see any lights hovering over the Moon. So, it’s clear that using better sensors gives a better understanding of what’s going on. That’s one reason that we detect things that previously may have been ignored. In addition, we can do much better follow-up research now with those excellent sensors that we have. Of course, there is more cluttering as there are more than ten thousand communication satellites around the earth and other gadgets like drones that complicate the picture. But I think we can approach it with much more rigor and I do hope that this release would lead to more research on this subject in the future so that we can tell if we are being visited by some cosmic neighbor, and whether there is a smarter kid on our cosmic block.

AAE: Statistically, we’re more likely today than ever to capture moving images or close-up photos of any inexplicable UFOs or whatever else that we might capture because pretty much every human on this planet nowadays has a smartphone in their pockets. Are you hopeful therefore that we will perhaps within our lifetime see something that is conclusive evidence one way or the other?

AL: One can be hopeful. UFOs are a mixed bag and most of the objects would be human-made or natural phenomena that we don’t fully understand. But we have to separate the wheat from the chaff. The key in doing science is not to detect a signal, but to show that the signal is not just noise, that a UFO is not just something that we don’t fully understand that happens to be in our neighborhood.

We also detect objects from outside the solar system in the form of interstellar objects. Over the past decade, astronomers detected them for the first time in history. So, that gives us an additional opportunity. The Rubin Observatory in Chile uses a camera of 3.2 gigapixels monitoring the southern sky every four nights and that would give us a much more data than before. So, all in all, I think we are at an exciting time and we should keep our eyes open.

I have the hope that we might find intelligence in outer space because when watching the news about geopolitics every day, I realize that there is room for improvement regarding human intelligence. So, my hope is that discovering alien intelligence will inspire us to do better. Encountering it will resemble a knock on the door by a neighbor. When the family hears that from inside the house, all the loud arguments quiet down. So, my hope is it will bring all of us to a better place because we would realize all humans here on Earth are in the same boat and should cooperate instead of fighting each other.

AAE: It’s a very good point actually, and it would certainly dissolve the separation between `us’ and `them’ among humans in the sense that we have this common unknown entity out there somewhere. But I want to ask you why you think there’s so much secrecy surrounding these files and who are we keeping the secret from?

AL: As we’ve been saying this is something that should be of common interest to every human on the planet if you look at it from a scientific perspective, but from a national security perspective — the sensors being used are classified. You don’t want adversarial nations to be aware of their capabilities, and moreover, not identifying objects shows vulnerabilities. If these are human-made objects, then it means that the defense of the U.S. has holes in it. As you know, there was the Chinese spy balloon, and obviously there could be many more of them hovering over the U.S. and getting surveillance data. So, if the US implies that they cannot really figure out the identity of those objects, and the Chinese know about it, then they will put even more. So, there are good reasons why the Pentagon or the national intelligence agencies prefer to keep it under wraps. An additional incentive is for them not to be scrutinized by the U.S. Congress that they’re not doing their job. But if you look at data from decades ago, of course it’s not relevant for the battlefield today. So, my hope is eventually there will be access to interesting data, and if it all turns out that all UFOs are human-made, so be it. It’s good to know that we’re not being visited.

When you imagine a dating partner of interstellar proportions from another star, you never know whether it will be friendly or maybe a serial killer. It’s a blind date. So, it’s good to check our cosmic environment just to make sure that we are not being visited. And if we are not, then we can then conclude that at least locally we are alone. We don’t know on the large scale of the Milky Way galaxy, perhaps there are other civilizations, but they’re not making their way to our backyard.

AAE: Is it just me or has there been a massive uptick in the last few months when this whole concept of discussing life beyond our planet? We’ve heard former President Obama talking about it in recent weeks saying that he thinks aliens do exist. President Trump has been making comments about this as he released the second of these batches of files. Why do you think this uptick of interest is happening right now?

AL: I do think this subject belongs to the mainstream because there are billions of Earth-Sun analogs within the Milky Way galaxy alone. And it’s like seeing billions of houses on the street that resemble your house. Now, the mainstream of the astronomy community says: “Well, these houses probably have microbes. So, let’s look for microbes.” They choose to invest 10 billion dollars over the next two decades in the next space telescope called the Habitable World Observatory. But when I went on blind dates before I met my wife, I was aiming high, not low. I was not looking for the most mediocre dating partners that are everywhere. I was looking for someone who is more intelligent than I am. And I think we should adapt that strategy in the search for extraterrestrial life within the scientific community. This should be a subject that is discussed openly.

Of course, there are lots of crackpots that come up with ideas or stories that make no sense, but that should not prevent us from discussing the obvious possibility that most of the stars formed billions of years before the Sun and there were civilizations before us, because we could learn from them. They can produce technological signatures that are easier to detect than the chemical fingerprints of microbes. And so, we should invest similar levels of funding in the search for technological signatures as we do in the search for biological signatures. Right now, nearly all the federal money goes to the search for microbes, and I just don’t think it’s the right approach. I think we should discuss it openly as former President Obama indicated and as President Trump just did. This is a subject I’ve been promoting over the past decade or so because I think it belongs to the mainstream, and it could foster the most important scientific discovery made.

“Are we alone?” is the most romantic question in science. We would observe the universe differently if we find partners out there. Right now, all the textbooks, some of which I’ve written, focus on the universe as a collection of matter and radiation. But if it has intelligent beings, we can connect to it emotionally. These would be the siblings in our family and it will also imply for any religious person that God is not a parent that attends only to one child.

AAE: One of the places that is the most suitable location for observing the night sky is the country that I’m speaking to you from, Saudi Arabia, because there are vast areas with dark night skies that are free of light pollution, and what’s called astro-tourism is apparently something that is taking off in in in this particular country. So, by this logic, shouldn’t the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have a high number of sightings of UFOs and inexplicable objects in the night sky?

AL: Potentially, yes. But the number of detected unidentified objects depends on how many people are looking up and how many observatories are constructed. I would highly recommend putting more observatories in the country that you’re in.

One thing about the lights coming from Earth is that, in principle, they can be seen from space, and Saudi Arabia has very bright parts that are probably visible all the way to the Moon. Someone out there could be looking at us, and we should be looking back at them. I once calculated how far away would the city like Tokyo be observable with the Hubble Space Telescope, and the answer is all the way to the distance of Pluto. So, if there was a city like Tokyo on Pluto, we would be able to see it with a Hubble Space Telescope. The only thing we need is curiosity to motivate us to look up. Because most of the time we just focus on down-to-Earth matters. As kids, we are curious, but we lose that curiosity as we become adults. And all that I’m recommending is to maintain our childhood curiosity, because that will bring us to a better place where eventually all humans would be more cooperative than they are right now.

AAE: We’ve talked about some of what’s been in these files, the green orbs, the discs, the fireballs that are described in there. And I want to ask you about your own sort of evolution in this field and the evolution of your beliefs. Would you say you are more or less convinced today than you were at the start of your scientific career, which was in the 1980s?

AL: Yes, I’m much more intrigued about aliens today than I was before. First, we know about the existence of planets around every star and some of them are in the habitable zone. So, it’s not speculation that conditions similar to Earth may have emerged in billions of other places within the Milky Way galaxy alone, and there are a trillion galaxies like it in the observable volume of the universe. To assume that we are alone is very arrogant of us, as we are probably not the pinnacle of creation. There is something better than us and one way for us to learn about it is by searching for it because space is vast, time is very long and so that requires a special effort on our behalf to find the evidence. It’s not obvious. You need telescopes to see things and even with our best telescopes, we can see an object the size of a football field only out to the distance of the Earth-Sun separation as a result of it reflecting sunlight. It’s challenging to detect objects similar in size to the biggest rocket that humans constructed, Starship, which is roughly the size of a football field. So, there may be things around us that we haven’t detected as of yet, and that’s exciting.

That is a realization that I came about over the past decade with the discovery of interstellar objects. The first one was called `Oumuamua, which means a scout in the Hawaiian language. It was discovered by telescope in Hawaii, and was very strange because the amount of sunlight reflected from it changed by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling every 8 hours. And that means that it has a flat and extreme shape. It was also pushed away from the Sun by some mysterious force without showing any evidence for evaporation cometary gas that would give it a push. So, it remains quite mysterious, and that’s what triggered my interest in searching in our backyard for a `tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor’.

We haven’t done so, and it’s a new way of searching for technological signatures. In the past we focused on searching for radio signals. And frankly, radio signals are not used as much for communication today as they were a century ago. The Artemis II mission used lasers for communication. So, it may well be that the aliens forgot about using these ancient technologies — as far as they are concerned — if they had a thousand years, a million years, or a billion years of science and technology. We had only one century since quantum mechanics was discovered. And look how far we went over that time.

What we know is an island of knowledge in an ocean of ignorance. There is a lot for us to learn and that’s what makes me excited. I should say that I am as curious as I was at a young age. I haven’t changed much in that regard. I refuse to become the adult in the room. I don’t pretend to know things that I don’t know. It’s very uplifting to actually have the privilege of being a scientist when you can follow your childhood curiosity and be guided by evidence.

AAE: President Trump said as this latest batch of files was made public: “Let the people decide for themselves, quote, what the hell is going on.” Just to wrap up this conversation, Dr. Loeb, you’ve had a few days to work out what’s going on and look at these files. Which of all of the dossiers that have been released up until this point have given you the greatest cause for intrigue?

AL: I would say none of the objects that we were shown provides clear evidence for an extraterrestrial origin. I can potentially explain all of the evidence in terms of human-made technologies. So, I’m waiting for the next batch of files to be released. I’m sure the government has better data and they also potentially have some materials that were retrieved from crash sites, the way that some testimonies in Congress under oath were mentioned. I’m looking forward to that. Even if the government wants to keep this data classified, it would make sense to have a board or a committee with proper clearance that looks into the classified data and recommends to the President of the United States, President Trump, how to interpret that kind of data and what to make of it and how to move forward. If there is clear evidence for an extraterrestrial origin, we should decide how to inform the public and we should also develop a plan to protect planet Earth. And that would be extremely interesting.

AAE: Okay, we’re going to have to leave it there. It’s been a real pleasure talking to you, Dr. Avi Loeb, theoretical physicist and professor of science at Harvard University. We really appreciate your time today, sir. Thank you.

AL: Thanks for having me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

Professional website:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Social media:

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb

https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb

The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS grazed the habitable zone of the Solar System on a path that was aligned to within 4.88 degrees with the orbital plane of Earth around the Sun. 3I/ATLAS also exhibited a prominent sunward jet, likely made of large fragments of water ice or rock that were able to penetrate through the Solar wind and radiation (as I discussed in a paper with Eric Keto, published here).

The SPHEREx space observatory detected organic molecules, such as CH3OH, H2CO, CH4, and C2H6 with a production rate of 5x10^{26} molecules per second, of order a tenth of the simultaneous production of water molecules (as reported here).

The robust spectroscopic detection of methane (CH4) was confirmed by the Webb telescope here. Interestingly, methane was only detected after the passage of 3I/ATLAS near the Sun. Its delayed production is puzzling because methane ice is hyper-volatile, with a significantly lower sublimation temperature than carbon dioxide (CO2), having a value of -220 compared to -97 degrees Celsius, respectively. This implies that methane ice near the surface of 3I/ATLAS would have been vigorously sublimating at the time of the first reports of outgassing from 3I/ATLAS before perihelion. However, neither the Webb spectroscopy nor the SPHEREx spectrophotometry from August 2025, detected methane. This suggests that methane was depleted in the outermost layers of 3I/ATLAS and was released as a result of the warming by sunlight only close to the Sun. Within this scenario, the early detection of carbon-monoxide (CO) outgassing on 3I/ATLAS is surprising, as carbon monoxide is more volatile than methane and should therefore be even more depleted from the surface, yet it was detected prior to methane. Why did methane appear only close to the Sun?

In the atmospheres of exoplanets, methane is considered a prominent biosignature. A recent publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) here, argued that methane could be the first detectable indication of life beyond Earth (as highlighted here). This raises an important question: Was the methane outgassing of 3I/ATLAS near the Sun produced by life?

The sunward jet (anti-tail) material shed by 3I/ATLAS could have carried extrasolar life on dust or ice fragments towards habitable planets within the Solar System. Such a phenomenon, called panspermia, would be analogous to the dandelion flower shedding its seeds to be carried by wind towards a fertile ground (as described here). I discussed Galactic panspermia in a 2018 paper published here, with my former postdocs Idan Ginsburg and Manasvi Lingam.

For interstellar icebergs, panspermia can be triggered by sunlight and is most effective if the iceberg arrives on a path that coincides with the orbital plane of habitable planets, as is the case for 3I/ATLAS. The large fragments of ice and rocks in its sunward jet are suitable as delivery vehicles of the seeds of extrasolar life.

I discussed the possibility of panspermia by the fragments shed from 3I/ATLAS in a research note posted here on February 3, 2026.

Could extrasolar life survive a long interstellar journey at freezing conditions inside an interstellar iceberg like 3I/ATLAS?

On Earth, microbes are known to survive in ice for millions of years, as discussed here and here. In a 2005 study here, microbes were found to survive inside ice crystals under 3 kilometers of snow for more than 30,000 years. The physicist Buford Price and graduate student Robert Rohde at the University of California in Berkeley, explained in a PNAS publication here that microbes could survive extreme conditions by creating a tiny film of liquid water around them, allowing oxygen, hydrogen, methane and other gases to diffuse to this film from air bubbles nearby, providing the microbes with sufficient food to survive. A 2020 study published in Nature Communications here demonstrated that microbes, 75 meters below the South Pacific Ocean seafloor (5,700 meters below sea level), are able to survive in rock sediments for over 100 million years in extremely low-energy conditions with very little nutrients. After being revived in the laboratory, these ancient microbes recovered from their hibernation state, metabolized and multiplied once again.

These are examples for the survival of terrestrial life-as-we-know-it. However, extrasolar life could be even more resilient to extreme conditions. Call it `survival of the fittest’ in interstellar space.

In addition to natural origins, there is the possibility of directed panspermia, whereby an interstellar gardener seeded 3I/ATLAS on a fertilization mission targeting the habitable planets in the Solar System. This would explain the rare alignment between the trajectory of 3I/ATLAS and the orbital plane of the habitable planets around the Sun, as well as the sunward jet with large fragments that plowed through the solar radiation and wind. Whether the seeds of extrasolar life reach a fertile ground in the Solar System remains to be seen.

If the NSF-DOE Rubin observatory will discover additional interstellar icebergs with clear statistical preference to the ecliptic plane, then the directed panspermia hypothesis will gain a higher likelihood. In such a case, our space agencies should plan a space mission to intercept the path of these icebergs. By directing a probe on a crash course towards the surface of these icebergs, we can diagnose the composition of the material they shed and infer whether it carries extrasolar life. In case it does, the most pressing question is whether extrasolar life resembles life-as-we-know-it. If so, perhaps life on Earth was seeded by an interstellar gardener.

This could be a fundamental discovery about our cosmic roots. Not only that life exists elsewhere, but interstellar gardeners may have seeded our existence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

Professional website:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Social media:

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb

https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb

The U.S. Department of War has released here two batches of files on Unidentified Objects (UFO/UAP). These are objects that the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies cannot identify. Below is a transcript of the latest interview I had last night with Deutsche Welle (DW) News, Germany’s international public broadcaster, available in video form here. DW’s comments and questions are marked with DW and my answers are marked with AL.

DW: Look closely. What you’re seeing here is an unidentified airborne object filmed by a U.S. military drone over Syria in 2021. Just released by the Pentagon. It suddenly accelerates and vanishes like something out of science fiction. As if it just went into warp speed.

Except this isn’t science fiction. It’s real military footage, part of a second batch of declassified U.S. government files released by the Pentagon yesterday. 51 videos, 7 audio recordings, and previously unseen written accounts. We’re going to go through what’s in this release and what, if anything, it may actually prove. And we’re doing that with Avi Loeb. He’s an astrophysicist and professor of science at Harvard University and leader of the Galileo Project. That’s Harvard’s dedicated research program for detecting signs of extraterrestrial technology.

Avi, thanks for joining me.

AL: Thanks for having me. It’s a great pleasure.

DW: So, Avi, what do you make of this video of what seems to be this object going into warp speed out of nowhere? What’s special about this or why could the US military not identify this object?

AL: What is unusual about the object is that it accelerates very rapidly. Usually, drones move at a relatively steady speed. We don’t know the distance to this object and the value of the acceleration but the fact that it’s capable of moving so fast instantly makes it unusual and it is potentially technology that could have been developed by an adversarial nation. So, I would argue that if the US intelligence agencies and the Pentagon are not familiar with the kind of motion that it exhibits, at the very least it poses a national security threat because apparently someone else on Earth was capable of developing such an object. This raises questions about what the U.S. intelligence knows and doesn’t know.

DW: You say someone else on Earth is capable of developing this. You specialize in the theory of extraterrestrial technologies. So, what makes you so certain that this is not one of them?

AL: Well, it could be but first we have to consider the down-to-Earth possibility that it is produced by humans. If we had the knowledge of the actual distance to the object, we could have assessed its acceleration and then whether it’s human-made or not. But without that information, we have to allow for the simplest interpretation that it is a human-made technology.

I am leading the Galileo project at Harvard University. We recently established an observatory in Las Vegas where one unit is on top of Sphere — an entertainment center 100 meters in size, and we have two other units 10 kilometers away from it, that allow us to triangulate by looking at a given object from different directions and inferring its distance, velocity and acceleration. So, if we had an image of the unidentified object from another direction, we could immediately tell whether its acceleration is unusual or not. And it could be an outlier that represents technologies beyond this Earth — in which case, it would constitute the most important discovery ever made by humanity. But before we reach that conclusion, we need to know its actual distance.

DW: You have been watching these Pentagon releases closely. Is there anything in the first batch which came out earlier this month or the second one that came out yesterday that really surprised you or made you think that this is potentially a big discovery?

AL: I was not familiar with all of this data in terms of images, videos, and documents dating all the way back to 1946. What is clear to me is that throughout recent decades, this subject was discussed extensively among military personnel, intelligence officers, people within the Pentagon and potentially also high-level politicians within the U.S. government. All of them are serious people that often decide on matters of life and death and they all seem to take it seriously. So, it’s definitely a serious matter. There are two possible interpretations for the subset of these objects which are quite unusual. One is that the defense system of the US has some holes in it, because it finds objects that it cannot recognize. And the second is that we are dealing with a major scientific discovery.

Why would the U.S. government be the first one to notice it? The 2026 U.S. defense budget is close to a trillion dollars, more than a third of the worldwide military expenses. It’s about a hundred times more than the national science budget. Moreover, astronomers are focusing their telescopes on small portions of the sky at any given time. So, if there are rare objects that appear every now and then, astronomers would just ignore them if they are close to Earth, whereas the U.S. government would monitor them because of national security concerns. So, the U.S. government would be the first to notice them.

There are also reports about materials from crash sites and potentially also biological pilots that were aired through testimonies under oath to the U.S. Congress by people who used to work in government and I don’t know if there is anything behind them, whether they’re real or not. But the more information we get in these releases, the more I feel like a kid in a candy store, because science is all about the evidence and if we see unusual evidence we should pay attention to it and help the government figure it out.

What I don’t like is the response from the mainstream of the scientific community which is supposed to be curious but is not. It’s dismissive. It doesn’t take it seriously and that is inappropriate given the fact that this data was collected by reliable people.

DW: Right. We’re going to be looking at a few more of these videos. The Pentagon says it can’t identify the flying objects in these dozens of videos, but at the same time saying that there’s no evidence that they’re extraterrestrial. You have a reputation in the scientific community for being more open to extraterrestrial interpretations than others. Other scientists say: “Well, you know, this could be an unidentified drone in one case, or it could be some sort of a visual effect that we haven’t explained. What do you make of the Pentagon saying there’s no evidence that these are extraterrestrial?

AL: What I say is that their data is not good enough. There are two ways to approach it. One is to see all the data that the U.S. government has. It could include, for example, satellite data which potentially has a resolution of a few centimeters on the ground and can tell us very clearly if an object looks different from human-made technologies or moves differently. We don’t have access to such data because the sensors are classified. I don’t know whether such data shows unusual objects. But the second point is we don’t need to rely on the U.S. government. We can simply look up for such objects.

I’m intrigued by the reports. Some of the information is redacted and all the data was obtained in ways that are not scientific. I do think it’s the obligation of scientists to pay attention to anomalies, especially if they are reported by reliable authorities. At the very least, my time is not wasted because I’m contributing to the national defense of the U.S.; I’m helping my government figure things out. If I do end up getting firm evidence for an extraterrestrial origin, it would change the future of humanity. It’s an amazing discovery to make because it could inspire new science, new technology. It would imply that we are probably not at the top of the food chain, cosmologically speaking, and it will have religious and philosophical implications. It’s completely inappropriate for scientists to ignore these reports.

If you look at the history of science, there are many incidents when the main mainstream dismissed ideas that ended up being correct, including — in the case of Germany, continental drift which was suggested by Alfred Wegener, who was not a geologist, in 1912 and took 40 years for the mainstream community of geologists to accept his idea. Wegener passed away by the time his correct suggestion was accepted. There are many such cases and there are also cases of the mainstream of science going in the wrong direction. Most recently, the physics community was advocating for a new symmetry of nature: Supersymmetry. Ten billion dollars were invested in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, in part to search for this symmetry. We did not find it. So, it’s not always true that the mainstream knows what it’s talking about.

I think that we all should all be curious. That’s the way science makes progress by being curious about unusual phenomena, anomalies that perhaps flag new knowledge that we currently do not possess.

DW: Well, Avi, I’m very curious to see what you will say about this next clip that we can play. This one is said to show multiple objects in formation over water near Iran. It was filmed in 2022. We have to pay special attention to the bottom left corner of the screen. Another object enters the frame then disappears. Again, this is another of these videos of objects that the U.S. military says it cannot explain. The White House actually posted this video clip on social media when the release went out. It made it one of their chosen highlights. Why do you think they picked this video?

AL: Because some of the objects are not only moving in air, they are also going into the water and they do not seem to be slowed down as much as you expect from our known technologies. And there are claims that data collected on objects underwater indicate very large speeds, very massive objects moving. This is an example of a video that they could have released. But there are many other data sets that they did not release that indicate objects moving between air and water and not behaving in the way that we expect. Water is very dense, a thousand times denser than air, and you would expect much more friction as an object goes into water.

These are phenomena that are not easily explained. Of course, the data is not good enough. We know the speed of the boats in this case, so we can tell the object is fast, but I think the intriguing fact is the way it interacts with water.

DW: Could these objects not just be Iranian drones or drone boats or surveillance assets, even friendly assets? Wouldn’t that be the easier explanation?

AL: Yes, they could be. But what the Pentagon is saying is that it is not familiar with this kind of object. And what it may mean is that the U.S. needs to update what it knows about other nations in terms of technologies they possess. We know about the Chinese spy balloon that was shut down in 2023 and represented a surprise. There must be a lot of such balloons floating around the US by adversarial nations.

I should say there are also mundane explanations to what astronauts were reporting in the released files. For example, Buzz Aldrin reported seeing flashes and these may be a result of Cherenkov radiation which is emitted when fast-moving charged particles move faster than light in a medium like water and emit blue light. His eyeballs may have detected cosmic-rays which have an intensity 200 times larger than on Earth when you travel to the Moon. There were also photographs from the Moon that show lights above the surface of the Moon. I found that the same lights appear in parts of the film that were not exposed to the lens of the camera. So, to me that indicates again cosmic-rays. There are also “snowflakes” reported by Scott Carpenter, an astronaut on the Aurora 7 (Mercury-Atlas 7) spacecraft, that are frost from the cooling system of the capsule that he was in. These are all conventional explanations. But even if one in a million objects that we look at is not from this Earth — that would be the biggest discovery ever made by humanity.

DW: Let’s look at another video of an object that very clearly seems to be of this Earth. It actually looks a lot like a balloon. This was shot over Lake Huron in 2023. It shows a US fighter jet shooting down something that looks a lot like a balloon. We know it was shot down right after the case of the Chinese spy balloon. President Biden ordered this object to be shot down. I’m wondering: is there some great mystery here or more than meets the eye to you?

AL: No, I think this is a very simple case. There is nothing mysterious about it. They could have collected the parts of the balloon. I wonder why they would release it now. It was shut down just like the Chinese spy balloon. This balloon was launched by local citizens rather than the Chinese and there is nothing mysterious about it. So obviously what the Pentagon released is a mixed bag. They don’t give us the interpretation of each object and many of these objects are indeed simple to understand. We shouldn’t get excited about each and every video.

But all in all, there are lots of interesting documents. For example, there is a report about an intelligence officer who went on a helicopter mission to figure out an unidentified object and saw an unidentified object that behaves in really strange ways. I should also say that clusters of objects could be drones because we know that there are swarms of drones that were used, for example, by the Iranians last year. At the very least, some of these objects are definitely related to human-made activities but it’s not clear that all of them are because we don’t have enough information.

DW: You talk about accounts by people. It’s not just videos that have been released. One document that got a lot of attention yesterday was not a video at all. It was a written account from a senior U.S. intelligence officer. It’s someone who’s still serving, still has full clearances. It’s not a whistleblower um or anyone like that. It is describing a helicopter mission, maybe what you were referring to. He wrote, “In the distance, we saw countless orange orbs swarming in all directions against the backdrop of the mountain. The display lasted several minutes before fading. We were virtually speechless after these observations.” What do you make of this account?

AL: A swarm of orbs might be just a swarm of drones. The Chinese have beautiful displays of thousands of drones moving together. The U.S. also has that. So, collective motions of a lot of objects could definitely be drones. In order for an object to be unusual or an outlier, we need to have an assessment of its speed being beyond the performance envelope of human-made technologies and that data is not provided in these cases.

DW: There’s another aspect I want to bring up here which is that most of these cases that are released cluster around certain regions. We can actually look on a map at where in the world these cases come from that were released by the Pentagon. You can see by far the largest cluster comes from the Middle East, namely from Iraq, Iran, Syria, the UAE, the Persian Gulf. Is there an explanation for this geographic concentration?

AL: Yes, there is a very simple explanation for that. The more sensors and eyes you have on the sky, the more likely you are to find something that you cannot explain. The Middle East is a region full of conflicts. We see a lot of clustering close to Iran, for example, where there was a war just recently. Those regions where there are lots of sensors looking at the sky are also regions where you would expect military equipment to be deployed and so that’s another source for unusual objects.

There is often a misconception that all you need to do in science is to detect a signal. That’s not true. What you need is to demonstrate that the signal is statistically significant relative to the noise. In any war zone there is a lot of noise, meaning objects that are being deployed for military purposes. And if you do see a signal of some unusual objects in a war zone, most likely it involves objects that you are not familiar with being deployed by other nations. It is obviously the task of the intelligence agencies to figure out what these are. And what the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon are telling us is that they’re not doing their job. Because if they knew what these objects are, which is their job, they wouldn’t tell us about them. They would immediately identify them. These would not be unidentified anomalous phenomena. So, I would argue that these concentrations in regions of conflict imply that the U.S. has some holes in its intelligence and therefore cannot identify such objects.

Of course, believers in UFOs or UAPs would argue: “The aliens are interested in those regions because they’re trying to save us from ourselves or they want to monitor what’s happening.” I don’t think that is likely. I think it’s most likely related to human-made devices, which obviously not everyone knows about. There are many more sensors looking at the sky in these regions so that we can see more unidentified objects there.

DW: I just want to pick up on something you said. You mentioned UAP. This is the term also used by the Pentagon. They don’t talk about UFOs — the term that I grew up hearing about. UAP stands for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Is there a difference between UFOs and UAP?

AL: No. The definition of phenomena is more general because it can refer to objects that go into the ocean and not just air. Originally these were classified as unidentified flying objects and that was the idea of a UFO. Also, this term got a stigma of not being a serious matter. People ignored it with ridicule and about five years ago they wanted to bring some more respect to the discussion by calling these objects UAPs and also extending the unidentified objects beyond aerial objects to objects that go into water and maybe space as well. Altogether we’re talking about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, UAP, which is the more general term. But the substance didn’t change.

DW: The Pentagon says it’s releasing all of these and that this is not the last batch. They’re going to continue releasing more batches. They say they’re doing it because, and I’m going to quote President Trump directly here, that “…People should be able to decide for themselves what the hell is going on.” Is that how scientific transparency is supposed to work?

AL: It’s good to see these files released, but they do not include data of scientific quality so far. The U.S. government may have scientific quality data, for example from satellites where you can get very high-resolution images and monitor how an object moves relative to the patterns on the ground, but they haven’t released that yet. So, for me the releases so far are more an encouragement to follow on these reports with scientific work the way I am doing in the Galileo Project. Presumably, if the objects existed for decades, then they exist also now and so we can actually find them. I’m much more in favor of the future than the past because we cannot go back in time and the best is yet to come.

If we detect any of these objects with the Galileo observatories that are currently operating, then we would have much more information and it will be shared with the public because our sensors are not classified.

The way to clear up this subject is to invest in research rather than going back in time. I think the government also needs to invest in using better equipment that will gather higher-quality data. Maybe they have some materials from crash sites. In that case, I can easily bring it to the laboratory of the Galileo project where we can immediately assess if it came from outside the solar system. We did that for an interstellar meteor that crashed in 2014. I led an expedition that retrieved some materials from the bottom of the ocean outside the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea. Our analysis demonstrated that a fraction of that material is indeed from outside the solar system based on chemical composition and isotopic analysis. We can do that analysis as long as the government will work with us.

I hope that the future will allow us to figure out what these unidentified objects are. We must stay curious. The important point is that we should not dismiss it or ridicule the subject but instead take it seriously and figure it out the scientific way. If we will find that any technological object is extraterrestrial beyond a reasonable doubt, I will not waste time going to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize ceremony because I will have much more important matters to attend to regarding the implications of such a discovery. Who cares about an award given by humans to humans if you’re encountering alien technology?

The discovery is more important than artificial intelligence in terms of shaping our future because artificial intelligence is based on the training data set limited to this Earth, whereas alien technology is based on a training data set beyond this earth. There is much more real estate beyond this earth and we don’t know much about it.

DW: Avi, you yourself say that most of these cases, at least in these files, are probably human-made, that they are from Earth. It sounds like you’re holding out a lot of hope that there may be a discovery from beyond this Earth. Why are you so hopeful? Why, despite your own assessment, are you really holding out this hope that something extraterrestrial will be found?

AL: For a variety of reasons. First, when I follow geopolitics, I don’t find a lot of intelligence in the way that humans behave on this Earth. And so, I’m hoping for a higher level of intelligence from space. But also, when I was younger, before I met my wife, I used to go on blind dates and my hope was always to aim high rather than low. My colleagues in the astronomy community are obsessed with searching for microbes. These are the most common forms of life that you may find out there. But if you go on an interstellar date, obviously you can aim at the most mediocre dating partners. You can marry the first one that you meet. But my objective is to find someone who is more intelligent than we are because this way we can learn something new from that experience. Instead of allocating all the research funds, the way that the astronomy community is doing right now, to the search for microbes, I would allocate billions of dollars also to the search for technological signatures in the form of objects that arrive into the solar system from outside, just because we didn’t do that. Maybe there is something out there.

I’m hopeful because originally Enrico Fermi asked the question: “Where is everybody?” He asked it 12 years before I was born. But if I was there, I would have put my arm around his shoulder and said: “Enrico, don’t be so presumptuous. You’re not that attractive. This is a question that every lonely person asks. Where is my dating partner? And the answer is, you have to search for them. You have to build a telescope. You have to look around. You can’t just ask this question and hope that the partner will show up in front of you.” And Enrico didn’t build any telescope. So, my point is that without searching, we will not find anything. And when we do search, when we go on dates, we have to be hopeful that our dating partner might be more intelligent than we are. Because if we always focus on mediocre dating partners like microbes, we might miss the opportunity to learn from someone who is better than us.

DW: Professor Avi Loeb, thank you so much for talking to me and good luck finding a more intelligent life out there.

AL: I’m doing my best. I found my wife on Earth, but maybe there is someone even more intelligent in the Universe at large. I don’t know. We will see.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

Professional website:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Social media:

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb

https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb

The U.S. Department of War has just released here its second batch of new public files on Unidentified Objects (UFO/UAP). These are objects that the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies cannot identify. If they are real and not spurious, there are two possible interpretations: either these are familiar human-made or natural objects or these are non-human-made objects. Either way, the matter is of great importance for national security or for basic science.

This second release contains 50 videos, 7 audio files with NASA logo, and 6 documents from 1949 to late 2025 that cover CIA, DOE, DOD/ODNI, and national laboratory sources.

UAP activity was unambiguously documented near nuclear or weapons facilities like Sandia, Los Alamos, Pantex and more. One document contains 116 pages related to a series of reported sightings in a top-secret facility in Sandia, New Mexico, from 1948 to 1950. This includes 209 sightings of green orbs, discs and fireballs reported near a military base. Another document describes a senior U.S. Intelligence Community officer sharing a firsthand helicopter mission to investigate UAP activity on a military test range in late 2025. The detailed narrative is operationally specific, indicating that we are dealing with a serious matter that should not be dismissed by policy makers or by scientists. The report states that an object approached within 10 feet of the helicopter, split in two, and accelerated beyond pursuit speed. Reports on clusters of orbs could be associated with swarms of drones if they are human made and used for military purposes by adversarial nations.

Some of the released reports have a mundane explanation. For example, the astronaut of the Mercury-Atlas 7 mission reported on May 24, 1962, the fascinating phenomenon of “fireflies” or “snowflakes” floating outside his spacecraft window. The phenomenon was not alien, but rather ice particles or frost that had condensed from the spacecraft cooling system onto the exterior of the capsule.

Among the videos, there is one (labeled DOW-UAP-PR067) which shows a startling spherical UAP going through the clouds. Another video (labeled DOW-UAP-PR051) from 2021 shows apparent instantaneous acceleration where a UAP moves sideways abruptly. Other videos show unusual motions, but it is difficult to ascertain whether we are witnessing parallax by the motion of the camera rather than the UAP. One of the videos shows a crash site of a UAP. It would be interesting to study the material remains from that crash. It looks like the crash site in a notable video when a fighter jet shot down an unidentified object over Lake Huron in 2023, a high-profile incident. Later reports indicated that the object might have been a balloon operated by a hobbyist group.

After scrolling through the data from the two releases so far, there is no doubt that UAP are a serious concern for national security and that one of the reasons for them to be classified is to avoid exposing the vulnerability of the U.S. Defense system and intelligence infrastructure. If UAPs represent drones, balloons or aircraft manufactured by adversarial nations, then the Chinese spy balloon incident from 2023 is just the tip of a giant iceberg of national security malfunction. However, if any of the UAP was not produced by humans, then it represents the biggest discovery ever made by humans.

Given that astronomers train their telescopes on small portions of the sky at any given time and that the defense budget for 2026 — nearly a trillion dollars, is two orders of magnitude larger than the national science budget, the U.S. government is likely to be the first to notice rare and unusual objects of extraterrestrial origin. Whether it did or not find alien technologies remains to be demonstrated with better quality data. The U.S. government has higher-resolution data with a few inches per pixel resolution from the fleet of reconnaissance satellites it operates, but we have not seen UAP from such data so far. Former intelligence director, John Ratcliffe, noted in 2021 that satellite imagery picked up UAP (as reported here), but such data may not be released because it was obtained by highly classified sensors.

Instead of waiting for the U.S. Government to tell us whether objects from outside the Solar system are visiting Earth, we can simply look up. The Galileo Project under my leadership operates three new observatories, where we analyze data on millions of objects with AI algorithms in search for outliers which move beyond the performance envelope of human made technologies. Here’s hoping that we will know more in the coming months, either from additional UAP releases from the U.S. Government or from the Galileo Observatories data.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

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