Very large drones-UFOs appearing soon across the U.S.
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By SpaceObserver
K2-18b has been in the spotlight ever since the JWST began analyzing its atmosphere. With its position in the habitable zone of its star and the recent hints at potential signs of water vapor, it makes you wonder if we are on the cusp of detecting biogenic signals. The idea that we could find evidence of life, even microbial, on a distant exoplanet is just mind-blowing.
Given that this planet is about 120 light-years away, the implications of finding any biogenic molecules would be significant. It raises a lot of questions about the methods we could use to analyze the atmospheric composition. How effective do you think current spectroscopy techniques are for identifying complex organic molecules among the gases present in K2-18b's atmosphere?
I'm particularly curious about how scientists differentiate between abiotic and biogenic sources for such signals. The environment on K2-18b could be affected by various geological processes. If we were to detect something that looks like a biomarker, how would we be able to rule out non-biological origins?
Additionally, considering the advancements in astrobiology and our understanding of potential life forms, what do you think the next steps should be if we do detect anything promising? Would it lead to new missions focused on this exoplanet, or would it be more about refining our current technology?
As we continue to search for life beyond Earth, K2-18b could very well be a pivotal case study. Understanding how to interpret its signals could not only inform our search for life on other exoplanets but could also impact our own perspective on life’s existence in the universe. Do you think we’re prepared for the kinds of discoveries we might be on the brink of?
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By Avi Loeb Medium
(Image credit: NewsNation)Yesterday, President Trump announced in a speech, accessible here, that the first releases of the UFO files will be coming out very soon. Below is a transcript of a new interview I had last midnight on the Jesse Weber Live of NewsNation, available in video form here. Jesse’s questions are marked with JW, and my answers with AL, respectively.
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JW: After New developments in a growing showdown over UFO secrets and what the government may be holding back. A top House lawmaker demanding answers right now after the Pentagon apparently missed a Tuesday deadline to turn over 46 classified UFO videos. And the footage spanning the globe reportedly shows tic-tac-like objects over war zones near U.S. bases inside restricted airspace. And this includes a 2023 incident where an F-16 reportedly shot down an unknown flying object over Lake Huron. The Pentagon has said that its UFO office is working with the White House and other agencies to consolidate records and, quote, facilitate the expeditious release of never-before-seen UAP information. President Trump also promising the release will happen. Here’s what he told the crowd in Phoenix today: “I recently directed the Secretary of War. How good is Pete Hegseth doing? It’s related to UFOs and unexplained aerial phenomena. And I figured this was a good crowd for this because I know people. You’re really into that. So, I’m pleased to report today. I thought I’d save it for this crowd because you’re a little bit out there. That this process is well underway and we found many very interesting documents i must say and the first releases will begin very very soon.”
But there’s no clear timeline, and obviously there are questions about whether there is a disclosure, whether there’s a delay. Representative Anna Paulina Luna, the chair of the task force for the declassification of federal secrets, says she is prepared to issue a subpoena to force those videos out into the open. Earlier today, she met with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who joins me now. Good to see you, sir.
So, you met with Representative Luna today (as described here). What did she tell you? I mean, is she confident that the files are going to be released soon?
AL: It was an interesting discussion. Among many other things, I described with my team the latest developments in the Galileo project that I’m leading, where we monitor the sky. We are seeing millions of objects. We are trying to figure out whether any of them is an outlier relative to human-made technologies. We don’t just need to wait for the U.S. government to tell us what’s in the sky. We can look up and use the best sensors, the best artificial intelligence algorithms. So that’s the part that I related to her. And, of course, she is trying to push for the release of data from government.
Now, we don’t know exactly what the data entails. Some of it was never seen
before outside government. Based on conversations I had with the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office in the Pentagon, there may be some data within the FBI that could be quite interesting. That’s what they told me a year ago. And that is, of course, a completely different matter than classified military data.
JW: Are we ready for this? Why do I say that? Representative Tim Burchett said if the public saw the things he’s been briefed on, it would keep us up at night worrying about it. Is something going on here where there’s a concern that we might not be able to handle it?
AL: I don’t think that’s a valid concern. I know that Representative Luna, along with Representative Tim Burchett were shown some materials. And she also describes it as very puzzling and intriguing. And I really am looking forward to seeing it so that I can analyze it with the scientific tools that I have. Because after all, you know, it’s not a matter of belief or conviction or impression or opinion. It’s just a matter of looking at the data and figuring it out.
These are objects in the physical reality that we all share and we should be able to figure them out or at least say that they are not human.
JW: Is that what it is? Is it actual beings or is it spacecraft? Is it aircraft that is the concern and what you’re hearing from Representatives Burchett and Luna?
AL: Ss far as I know, we are dealing with objects that cannot be easily understood.
And there is no evidence, as far as I heard, for any beings. Of course, we heard the testimony from David Grush about it, but I haven’t seen any thread of evidence leading to that. And also, I asked the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office representatives, and they claim that they haven’t seen anything related and they have access to all information within government.
Now, it’s also possible that this is compartmentalized, that different parts within government, or in fact, some of it might be within corporations like Lockheed Martin that we don’t have access to. So, this could take a while for us to see everything.
JW: So in other words, you’re saying it could be red tape, not a cover-up.
AL: I don’t think the government would keep a secret for so long knowing what these objects are. I think the reason that some of this information is not released is primarily because intelligence officers or military personnel prefer not to be embarrassed about not figuring out what’s in the sky. They’re getting paid to do that. And in addition, some of it is classified because the data was collected by classified sensors. That’s fair. So there are many, many reasons for keeping it the wraps. But I think it’s really important. for scientists to look into it and the public to be aware of what it
means.
JW: All right. We will wait and see. Avi Loeb, thank you so much. Good seeing you. Have a great weekend.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)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 (2005–2026), 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
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By Avi Loeb Medium
The Near Transits of the Inner Planets Across the Face of the Sun from the Vantage Point of 3I/ATLAS
The expected trajectory of 3I/ATLAS will nearly align with a transit of the Earth across the face of the Sun on January 22, 2026. (Image credit: NASA/JPL Horizons)When a planet transits in front of the disk of its host star, its blocks some of the starlight and reduces slightly the brightness of the star. The tiny fraction of starlight passing through the atmosphere of the planet allows to measure the atmospheric composition.
In particular, the transit of the Earth in front of the Sun produces a dimming of only 0.008 percent for a distant observer that is aligned with the Sun-Earth axis. Nevertheless, a high-quality spectrograph on a purposely designed space telescope could identify the spectral fingerprints of oxygen and methane molecules as biological signatures of terrestrial life, as well as tetrafluoromethane (CF4) and trichlorofluoromethane (CCl3F) as technological-signatures of industrial pollution.
In 2014, I tasked my undergraduate student then, Henry Lin — who currently serves as an assistant professor at the Princeton’s Physics department, to calculate the detectability of the spectral fingerprints of industrial pollution in exoplanet atmospheres. Our paper, published here, identified detectable spectroscopic features of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in planetary atmospheres.
An interested observer passing through the ecliptic plane of the Solar system could employ the transit method to monitor the evolving biological and technological conditions on Earth in real time. We must keep this possibility in mind while monitoring anomalous interstellar objects as candidates for technological probes which were sent into the solar system by extraterrestrial civilizations. The ideal path for transit-focused probes are retrograde trajectories (opposite to the motion of the Earth) that are aligned with the ecliptic plane of the Earth around the Sun, where they will be able to monitor as many transits of Earth or other solar-system planets throughout their journeys.
As it turns out, we have right now a suspicious interstellar visitor which follows a retrograde orbit which is aligned to within 4.9 degrees with the ecliptic plane. Even though this interstellar object 3I/ATLAS displays many anomalies (as listed here), the official view is that 3I/ATLAS is a comet of natural origin. However, if it happened to be a technological probe equipped with a spectrograph — it could have used its journey to observe transits of the Sun by all the inner solar system planets: Mars + Mercury, Venus and Earth on October 2, 2025; November 4, 2025; and January 22, 2026, respectively. Unfortunately, the actual orbital inclinations by several degrees of 3I/ATLAS and the planets relative to the ecliptic plane, make all these transits except Venus a near miss from the precise vantage point of 3I/ATLAS as it crosses the inner solar system.
If 3I/ATLAS had been perfectly aligned with the ecliptic plane, then it would have detected biological markers such as oxygen and methane, when it entered the outskirts of the Oort Cloud at 100,000 times the Earth-Sun separation (AU) some 8,000 years ago. More recently, in 1950 — when Enrico Fermi had asked the question: “Where is everybody?”, 3I/ATLAS had been at a distance of about 1,000 AU where it could have detected industrial pollution in the Earth’s atmosphere — indicating that our planet went through an industrial revolution. In 1977, when the “Wow! Signal” was detected, 3I/ATLAS was at a distance of about 600 AU from Earth. And on January 22, 2026 when the Earth will nearly align with the Sun from its vantage point, 3I/ATLAS will be at a small distance of only 2.35 AU from Earth.
The trajectory of 3I/ATLAS nearly aligned with transits of Mars+Mercury (top) and Venus (bottom) in front of the face of the Sun on October 2 and November 4, 2025, respectively. (Image credit: NASA/JPL Horizons)The NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory in Chile is expected to harvest several dozens of interstellar objects over the next decade. Given the near misses of 3I/ATLAS, we should check if any of them aligns precisely with transits of planets as they approach the Sun.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)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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By Avi Loeb Medium
A 14th Anomaly of 3I/ATLAS: Alignment of Its Rotation Axis with the Sunward Direction at Large Distances
Phase angle of the position angle of the anti-tail of 3I/ATLAS, measured at a projected distance of 6,000 kilometers from the brightness peak and phased with the calculated 7.74 (± 0.35) hour period. The horizontal red line is the mean value of position angles, representing the sky-projected orientation of the rotation axis. (Image credit: Serra-Ricart, Licandro & Alarcon 2025)The new paper (accessible here) reporting the detection of a periodic wobble in the anti-tail jet of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS during July and August, 2025, implies that the jet base is offset by less than 8 degrees from the poles associated with the rotation axis of the nucleus. As the nucleus rotates, the jet precesses along a cone surrounding this rotation axis. This suggests that at large distances from the Sun, 3I/ATLAS has a permanent dayside and a permanent nightside because its rotation axis is nearly aligned with the direction of the Sun.
If the jet base has a simple natural origin from of a pocket of ice which is sublimated while being exposed to sunlight, the inferred geometry constitutes a new 14th anomaly for 3I/ATLAS in addition the 13 anomalies listed before here.
The new anomaly relates to the small probability of the rotation axis of the nucleus of 3I/ATLAS being aligned to within 8 degrees with the direction of the Sun, when the interstellar object approached the Sun at a heliocentric distance larger than 5 times the Earth-Sun separation (AU). The chance of that alignment occuring at random is 0.005. If not for that special alignment, the anti-tail jet towards the Sun would have been oriented at a much larger angle relative to the rotation axis and would have shown a much larger wobble in position angle than the observed value of 8 degrees. With a larger misalignment angle, it could have featured prominent gaps in activity as its base exits the dayside and enters the nightside of 3I/ATLAS.
Images of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. Thin purple lines indicate the position angle of the detected anti-tail jet at a projected distance of 6,000 kilometers from the brightness peak (dotted red circle). For each frame, the observation date and the start and end times in UTC are shown above the panels, along with the total number of sidereal-tracking exposures and the cumulative integration time. The projected velocity vector (red arrow) and the anti-solar direction (yellow arrow) are marked, as well as the image scale and orientation. Degraded orange lines denote the projected rotation-axis direction, derived from mean value of the anti-tail positions angles, while yellow lines trace the tail direction. Brightness contours are overplotted using ten logarithmically spaced levels between the 20th and 95th percentiles of pixel intensity in each frame. The anti-tail refers to the narrow, linear, black feature extending roughly northwest in the direction of the Sun. (Image credit: Serra-Ricart, Licandro & Alarcon 2025)This coincidence applies to the geometry of the anti-tail and the rotation axis of 3I/ATLAS before perihelion. However, the remarkable new revelation after its perihelion on October 29, 2025,gleaned from the latest images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (as discussed here) and ground-based telescopes (as discussed here, here and here), is that 3I/ATLAS still shows a prominent anti-tail jet in the direction of the Sun. This is despite the fact that 3I/ATLAS is currently receding away from the Sun and its Sun-facing side used to be on its night-side when 3I/ATLAS was approaching the Sun in July-August 2025.
The base that launched the anti-tail jet in July 2025 is now on the night-side of 3I/ATLAS. The comet interpretation of 3I/ATLAS requires a new pocket of ice near the opposite pole of the rotation axis, that gives rise to a prominent new anti-tail jet after perihelion. Since the new anti-tail is observed to be collimated to within 8 degrees out to half a million kilometers in the latest image of 3I/ATLAS — taken on December 15, 2025 (as discussed here), the proximity of the new jet base relative to the rotation axis and the Sun’s new direction raises the 14th anomaly to the second power. In other words, the chance of two major pockets of ice being located near the rotation poles of 3I/ATLAS, so that one of them would be on the dayside when 3I/ATLAS approaches the Sun from a great distance and the other is on the dayside when 3I/ATLAS is on its way out of the Solar system, while both being within 8 degrees of the nearest rotation pole when facing the Sun, is the square of 0.005 or a tiny probability of merely 0.000025.
Of course, a technological spacecraft might have a reason for aligning the outflow of gas from its thrusters in the direction of the Sun. We do not have high-resolution images of the jet direction near perihelion.
The tight collimation of the anti-tail out to a distance of half a million kilometers, larger than the distance to the Moon, despite the solar radiation pressure and wind after perihelion, raises new questions. Why does the sunward jet maintain its collimation without being broadened or pushed away from the Sun? What is its speed and mass loss rate? Hopefully, upcoming spectroscopic observations of the material it carries will clarify the launch mechanism of the anti-tail.
The derived periodicity of 7.74 (± 0.35) hours in July-August 2025, could imply a nucleus rotation period of 15.48 (± 0.70) hours if the anti-tail originates from a single active spot at any given time. This value is indeed consistent with the rotation period derived during July 2025 from the periodic brightness variability of 3I/ATLAS: 16.16 (± 0.01) hours (as reported here) .
For a nucleus radius of 2 kilometers with a rotation period of 15.5 hours, the centrifugal acceleration of the surface of 3I/ATLAS is 0.0025 centimeters per second squared. This value is tiny, just 2.6 millionths of the gravitational acceleration on the surface of Earth, 1-gee. The rotation period needs to be shortened to 1.5 minutes in order to create an artificial gravity similar to 1-gee.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)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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By USH
These images captured by the Curiosity rover in 2014 reveals yet another unexplained aerial phenomenon in the Martian atmosphere, a cigar-shaped object with a consistent width and rounded ends.
What makes this anomaly particularly compelling is the sharp clarity of the image. According to Jean Ward the stars in the background appear crisp and unblurred, indicating that the object is not the result of motion blur or a long exposure. Notably, the object appears in five separate frames over an 8-minute span, suggesting it is moving relatively slowly through space, uncharacteristic of a meteorite entering the atmosphere. It also lacks the fiery tail typically associated with atmospheric entry.
Rather than a meteor, the object more closely resembles a solid, elongated craft of unknown origin. When oriented horizontally, it even appears to feature a front-facing structure, possibly a porthole or raised dome, hinting at a cockpit or command module.
Whether this object is orbiting beyond the visible horizon or connected to the surface far in the distance, its sheer size is unmistakable. Its presence raises compelling questions, could this be further evidence of intelligently controlled craft, whether of extraterrestrial or covert human origin, navigating through Martian airspace?View the full article
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