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By UAPResearcher
The most recent flights of New Shepard have been pretty interesting to follow. With the increasing frequency of suborbital missions, it seems like Blue Origin is really ramping up their efforts. The last few missions had a variety of passengers, including some notable figures, which adds a unique layer to the experience for those on board and for us watching from afar.
I noticed that the onboard experience looks quite different from their earlier flights. The upgrades to the capsule seem to enhance passenger comfort and engagement. It’s great to see how they are trying to make space travel more accessible and enjoyable for non-professionals. Do these improvements make you feel more excited about the prospects of space tourism?
Also, I found it intriguing how Blue Origin is positioning their suborbital flights as both a thrill ride and an educational experience. The emphasis on seeing Earth from space and experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness really seems to resonate with the general public. Do you think this focus on education and experience will attract more people to consider a flight?
Looking forward, it would be interesting to see how they manage safety with the increasing number of flights. They’ve demonstrated a strong track record so far, but with more commercial flights taking off, how do you think they’ll balance safety and frequency? The recent flights certainly add to the narrative of continuous improvement in reusable rocket technology.
As we watch Blue Origin's progress, it's also worth considering how their work might influence the broader commercial spaceflight landscape. Other companies are gearing up to compete in the space tourism arena, and New Shepard seems to be setting a strong precedent. How do you think this competition will affect pricing and accessibility?
In summary, the recent suborbital flights of New Shepard mark an exciting time for space tourism. As they continue to innovate and expand their offerings, I’m curious how this will shape the future of human spaceflight. Are we nearing an era where space travel becomes routine for civilians?
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By Avi Loeb Medium
(Image credit: The Hill’s Rising, 2.14M subscribers)Below is a transcript of a latest interview I had today with The Hill’s Rising, one out of the 30 interviews I had over the past three days, available in video form here. The questions are marked below with the label Q, and my answers with A, respectively. In an hour, I will be boarding a plane to New-York City to appear in a cameo playing myself on the movie set of “Sol Hershkowitz’s Guide to Extraterrestrial Life”. It should be straightforward for me to play myself, , as you may tell from the interview appended below.
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Q: The Trump administration released the first batch of so-called UFO files last week. Some of the highlights include obscure images of what could be anything in former astronaut Buzz Aldrin observing `a fairly bright light source’ while on Apollo 11 and a 1963 government memorandum showing the Kennedy administration’s concern that the government wasn’t prepared for human to alien contact, however unlikely the possibility.
Joining us now to make sense of these files is Harvard University physicist and head of the
Galileo project, Professor Avi Loeb, a frequent guest on The Hill’s Rising, one of our favorites. Welcome back, Professor. Nice to see you.
A: Thanks for having me.
Q: Well, let’s just get right to it. What were you most intrigued by, as these files become available?
A: Well, as we go back in time, we could see documents dating all the way to 1947 where high-level officials are communicating about unusual objects in the sky. All in all, there is no clear evidence for an object that is produced by some alien civilization. Some of the data is redacted. We have inconclusive images or videos. But the release serves a very important psychological purpose of bringing the conversation to the public domain both regarding the general public but also within science.
Clearly, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies are unable to identify the nature of some objects. There are two possible interpretations. One way to explain it is if the objects are human-made, they are produced by adversarial nations and they show the vulnerability of our defense system so this is a serious matter. We all know about the Chinese spy balloon as an example. But then the other possibility is that maybe it’s a mixed
bag and one in a million objects is indeed from beyond this Earth, representing some advanced technologies that we do not possess. In that case, its detection constitutes the biggest discovery ever made by humanity. So, it’s a win-win situation to attend to this data seriously and try to figure out what it means.
Unfortunately, the first release does not include enough information on some of the
Images or the videos, and many of them could be explained in simple ways. The flashes of light that Buzz Aldrin described might be cosmic rays. There are eyewitness testimonies
of an ellipsoidal object that was reported to the FBI but we don’t have data from instruments about this object. I went over the data with my research team and we just couldn’t infer the distance, velocity or acceleration of objects that they’re exhibiting.
This happens to be a goal of the Galileo Project that I’m leading. We have three observatories and we are looking at each object from different directions so we can infer the altitude, velocity and acceleration, to inform us whether it lies outside the performance envelope of human-made technologies. That’s essential.
However, this release is just the first step. We will have additional releases in the
coming weeks and months and presumably the more sensitive data the higher quality data takes more time to declassify. We would see it coming out.
Regarding the Apollo mission images, I should note that flares on the Moon can originate from the impact of rocks. The Artemis II astronauts noticed six flares when they hovered over the dark side of the Moon. They had an excellent view, much better than the Apollo missions were on the surface of the Moon and they didn’t notice anything unusual. They took thousands of images just last month and these images did not show any lights orbiting the Moon in an unusual way. So, I would argue that based on the latest Artemis II data, there is nothing peculiar on the Moon. What we are seeing in these Apollo images are either impacts of asteroids on the surface or some optical artifacts from the camera that was taking these images.
Q: So — Avi, this was this was the first release and like you said, you comb through the data and some people were expecting to see something about little green men. They didn’t
get that exactly, but what did you get from combing through the data about how much people’s curiosity should be satisfied when they think about other life forms existing out there?
A: What we have are documents also videos and images from military personnel and the intelligence agencies that discuss objects they cannot understand. These are serious people. We should not dismiss those reports, especially because some of them were collected by instruments. What we should do is try to figure out what these objects are. Of course, data from past reports is limited.
I assume that the government has much better data. For example, right now the U.S. government employs an array of satellites that were very helpful in noticing the infrared flashes coming from ballistic missile launches in Iran, for example. We can get images of Earth with a spatial resolution of a few inches and they can easily monitor objects that look unusual and measure their velocity or acceleration relative to features on the ground. But that’s the most sensitive data that will not be easily released because the sensors being used right now are classified. Nevertheless, I am really curious to see a high-resolution image or a high-quality video that can demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that we’re dealing with something that is not human-made. I haven’t seen that as of yet. In addition, there is also the issue of whether the government has access to materials from crash sites and if so, such materials can be analyzed. In the laboratory that I operate within the Galileo project, we analyzed materials from an expedition to the Pacific Ocean after we were trying to retrieve materials from an interstellar meteor. That’s an object that collided with Earth back in 2014 and exploded over the Pacific Ocean. We went there and collected materials and found clear evidence for an extra-solar origin. We can do the same thing with any materials that the U.S. government collected.
I don’t expect members of the Pentagon or the intelligence agencies to become scientists. Their day job is focused on national security and so if they see unusual things that they cannot figure out, they put it aside because they don’t want to be scrutinized that they’re not doing their job. Also, they don’t want adversarial nations to know about the
vulnerability of our defense system so they would classify all that data.
However, I do think that scientists should look into that data and help the Pentagon, all the intelligence agencies figure it out because we want to know which objects are in our sky. It’s really important for national security and also for science. And that’s what we are trying to do in the Galileo Project. I’m happy to help members of the Pentagon or the intelligence agencies in working through additional data as it comes along in the future.
I should mention also that there are 46 videos that were requested by Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna from the Pentagon and hopefully they will be released in the next batch
that will come out within the next month. Congresswoman Luna visited my office at
Harvard University a few weeks ago and I had an extended discussion with her about the Galileo Project and other matters related to unidentified objects.
Q: And I so much appreciate that approach and her approach because I want, you know, as much of the information that the government has declassified as possible and the secretive way the government has proceeded is not encouraging. But as a more skeptical person of some of these claims I confront, I often end up in this frustrating position where someone who has, you know, very unimpeachable credibility as a pilot or a scientist described some image and you say we have no rational explanation for this image, but I went to Las Vegas a month ago and I saw a magic show and I have no rational explanation for any of the things I saw. But that doesn’t mean magic is the most likely explanation. It just means it’s something that I can’t explain. But just because I can’t explain it doesn’t mean, like you said, was it a lens flare? Is it a smudge on the lens? Is it similar to the first people who looked through a telescope and saw the red in their own eyes reflected back on them and thought it was canals on Mars. Very, you know, smart, well-meaning people. No one trying to deceive us. And I can’t help but get past some of that, as we look through these things. But obviously evidence of crashes, recovered technological things of that nature that some people have claimed the government has would be so definitive proof. And that’s the
thing that never shows up in any of these declassified documents.
A: I completely agree with you and I think that it’s important for scientists to look at the data and try to make sense of it if indeed it represents anomalies. You would expect the government to be the first to notice rare events because the defense budget for 2026 is nearly a trillion dollars, about a hundred times bigger than the science budget of NASA. Astronomers are not really monitoring the sky as much as the intelligence agencies of the U.S. and one would expect that if there are rare events they would be the first to notice them. However, it’s not their day job to keep analyzing the anomalous data because they have other duties which are more pressing.
New knowledge in science was always a result of detecting anomalies, things that do not line up with what we expected. A very distinguished physicist, Albert Michelson gave a speech at the University of Chicago in 1894, and said that fundamental physics is pretty much over. All we need now is to measure the fundamental constants to the fifth decimal point. That was one decade before Albert Einstein came up with special relativity, two decades before Einstein came up with general relativity — explaining gravity as curvature of spacetime, and it was three decades before quantum mechanics was discovered. Just to show you that as much as scientists may be proud of their craft, there is a lot for
us to learn and we should attend to anomalous data. However, anomalies are a mixed bag and most of the unidentified objects that we see probably have mundane explanations. But the government needs some help on that and that is why I am leading the Galileo Project. We are doing our best and we are in communication with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in the Pentagon.
Q: I always appreciate the historical perspective that the certainty of experts in past stages of our history who said: “Yes, we’ve answered all the questions”, which is a very useful perspective because the questions were not all answered. Professor Avi Loeb, thank you so much for being with us. We appreciate it.
A: Thanks for having me. I should mention that the best is yet to come. I think that the better, more intriguing data will come in the coming months. So, let’s stay tuned and see what it includes.
Q: Great. We’ll have you back to discuss that. Thank you so much.
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.
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 USH
An old security camera video from 2021 shows bizarre footage from an unknown location. A man is seen walking alone when he is suddenly followed by another individual. Moments later, the second man attacks him, knocking him to the ground, likely in an attempted robbery.
As the two struggle, something strange appears to happen. A shadowy figure seems to detach from the victim’s body, as if emerging from him, and confronts the attacker. The presence of this figure appears to protect the victim during the altercation.
The attacker, clearly bewildered by what he is witnessing, quickly flees the scene. Shortly after, the shadowy figure disappears. The victim then gets back on his feet and continues on his way, seemingly unaware of what just occurred.
Some interpret this incident as possible evidence of unseen spiritual realms. The true nature of the shadowy figure remains unknown, but it has led to speculation that it could have been a spiritual guardian-like being. It is suggested that these beings protect individuals throughout their lives and intervene during critical moments.
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By Avi Loeb Medium
(Image credit: Pete Saloutos/Getty Images)In a new paper that I co-authored with my brilliant postdoc Richard Cloete, available here, we report the identification of two previously unrecognized interstellar meteor candidates in NASA’s CNEOS fireball database.
By exploiting an empirically calibrated uncertainty model from 2025 (reported here), we find two events that robustly exceed the escape velocity from the Solar System. CNEOS-22 (detected on 2022–07–28 in the eastern tropical Pacific) exceeds escape by 8.7 standard-deviations and CNEOS-25 (2025–02–12) exceeds escape by 5.5 standard deviations. For both events, none of a million Monte-Carlo realizations yield an orbit that is gravitationally bound to the Sun. The adopted error model would need to underestimate the true uncertainties by factors of 5–9 for either candidate’s unbound status to be marginal.
The discoveries of 1I/`Oumuamua, 2I/Borisov, and 3I/ATLAS demonstrated that interstellar objects larger than a football field, transit the inner Solar System. Although smaller bodies evade telescope detection, they can reveal themselves as fireballs when they enter Earth’s atmosphere at speeds exceeding the local escape velocity from the Solar System.
The CNEOS fireball database, maintained here by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is a global, space-based catalog providing event-level velocity vectors for bolide detections from U.S. Government sensors. These velocity measurements enable computation of heliocentric orbits and testing whether an impactor was gravitationally unbound to the Sun. However, CNEOS publishes no per-event uncertainties, and the accuracy of reported velocities has varied across sensor generations.
Previous interstellar meteor reports have focused on IM1 from 2014–01–08 and IM2 from 2017–03–09, based on nominal heliocentric speeds exceeding escape velocity. Independent analysis of IM1 by the U.S. Space Command confirmed its interstellar identification (as reported here), but some astronomers raised concerns about the velocity accuracy of pre-2018 CNEOS data — arguing that without a calibrated uncertainty model, it is impossible to distinguish genuinely unbound trajectories from measurement artifacts.
The situation improved substantially with a 2025 empirical calibration (reported here) which cross-matched CNEOS events with independent ground-truth networks. This analysis reveals two regimes: a high-discrepancy regime for pre-2018 events and a low-discrepancy regime for post-2018 events. This calibration provides, for the first time, an empirically grounded basis for formal statistical assessment of interstellar candidacy.
We analyzed the complete CNEOS fireball catalog of events with reported latitude, longitude, altitude, and three-component velocity vector. For each event, the Earth-fixed velocity was transformed to inertial geocentric coordinates, accounting for Earth rotation, precession, nutation, and polar motion. After the Earth’s gravitational influence was removed, the heliocentric velocity was inferred by subtracting the Earth’s heliocentric velocity at the event time. An event was classified as an interstellar candidate when its speed exceeded the escape speed from the Solar System, given the Earth-Sun separation at the event time.
Restricting attention to the post-2018 low-discrepancy era, two events emerge as statistically-robust interstellar candidates. Both have positive heliocentric specific energy at their nominal velocities and remain unbound to the Solar System in all of a million Monte-Carlo realizations. Neither has been previously identified as an interstellar candidate.
Heliocentric speed (vertical axis) versus geocentric speed (horizontal axis) for CNEOS fireballs. The horizontal dashed line marks the bound/unbound boundary at the solar escape speed of about 42 kilometers per second. Grey circles are low-discrepancy events with bound nominal orbits. Several events lie above the boundary at their nominal velocities: pre-2018 events (open squares) including IM1 and IM2, and a post-2018 marginal event (open diamond). CNEOS-22 (2022–07–28) and CNEOS-25 (2025–02–12) (colored stars) are the only post-2018 events that remain robustly unbound across all of our million Monte-Carlo realizations.CNEOS-22: 2022–07–28
This fireball occurred at 01:36:07 UTC over the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, approximately 600 kilometers west of Peru, at an altitude of 37.5 kilometers. Its impact energy was equivalent to 0.69 kiloton of TNT and its impact speed was 30 kilometers per second.
The heliocentric speed of this bolide is 46.98 kilometers per second, exceeding the solar escape speed of 41.79 kilometers per second. Under the Monte Carlo analysis, the deviation is statistically significant at a level of 8.7 standard deviations. None of the million draws yield an orbit bound to the Solar System.
The impact energy and speed imply a bolide with a mass of 6.4 metric tons and a radius of about 0.9 meters for a solid density of 2 grams per cubic centimeter. The air’s ram-pressure at the fireball’s peak-brightness altitude was 5.2 mega-pascals.
CNEOS-25: 2025–02–12
This fireball occurred at 04:33:39 UTC over the Barents Sea, between Novaya Zemlya and Franz Josef Land in the high Arctic, at 42-kilometer altitude. Its impact energy is equivalent to 0.13 kiloton of TNT and its impact speed is 22 kilometers per second.
The heliocentric speed is 45.63 kilometers per second, exceeding the escape speed of 42.4 kilometers per second with a difference that is 5.5 standard deviations. None of the million Monte-Carlo draws yield a bound orbit.
The impact energy and speed imply a bolide with a mass of 2.2 metric tons and a radius of about 0.6 meters for a solid density. The air’s ram-pressure at the fireball’s peak-brightness altitude was 1.5 mega-pascals.
Monte-Carlo distributions of heliocentric speed for CNEOS-22 (2022–07–28) on the left and CNEOS-25 (2025–02–12) on the right, based on a million realizations of the uncertainty model. The dashed vertical line marks the solar escape speed at each event’s heliocentric distance. In both cases, the entire distribution lies above Solar System escape, with no bound realizations observed. Inserts provide the mean heliocentric speed (in km/s), the mean margin above escape (in km/s), and its statistical significance in units of standard deviations.***
The diameters of both objects, 1.8 meters for CNEOS-22 and 1.2 meters for CNEOS-25, are comparable to the height of an adult person or a 7-year-old kid respectively.
The heliocentric interstellar speeds of the two candidates, 21.5 kilometers per second for CNEOS-22 and 16.9 kilometers per second for CNEOS-22, sample the low end of the velocity distribution expected for objects from the Galactic solar neighborhood. For comparison, 1I/`Oumuamua entered the Solar System with 26 kilometers per second and 2I/Borisov with 32 kilometers per second, whereas 3I/ATLAS entered with 58 kilometers per second. The lower excess speeds of the fireball candidates are qualitatively consistent with the expectation that smaller, fainter impactors are preferentially detected at lower encounter speeds, as long as their atmospheric luminosity is sufficient to trigger space-based sensors.
CNEOS-22 occurred over the open Pacific at 3–4 kilometer depth, presenting deep-ocean recovery challenges similar to the IM1 expedition under my leadership with its results summarized here. The higher impact energy of CNEOS-22 suggests a more massive impactor with potentially more recoverable debris than CNEOS-25.
Location of CNEOS-22 in the Pacific Ocean near Peru.However, CNEOS-25’s Arctic location (Barents Sea) offers the advantage of a shallow continental shelf (200–400 meters) but the constraints of sea-ice logistics. Crucially, CNEOS-25 is recent (February 2025), and rapid mobilization could maximize recovery prospects before material redistribution by ice drift and currents.
Location of CNEOS-25 over the Barents Sea in the Arctic.***
We live in exciting times, with multiple opportunities to study interstellar packages that just arrived to our mailbox here on Earth. Future expeditions hold the promise of revealing the contents of these packages. I will be the first to board any interstellar expedition ship.
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.
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 USH
Researchers utilizing publicly available Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from Capella Space and Umbra have uncovered significant hidden structures within and beneath the CFR Pyramid on the Giza Plateau. The study reveals five distinct "Zed" structures located above what was previously believed to be the pharaoh’s burial chamber, resembling similar formations found in the Khufu Pyramid. These structures are connected by geometric pathways, with additional secondary formations identified through satellite imaging.
Source and credit images: The Reese report / The Kafre Research Project.
Most notably, eight vertically aligned cylindrical structures, arranged in two parallel rows from north to south, extend 648 meters underground. These formations merge into two massive cubic structures, each approximately 80 meters per side. Tomographical analysis indicates that the cylindrical structures function as hollow wells surrounded by descending spiral pathways.
Further research suggests that these subterranean formations are not limited to the CFR Pyramid but extend beneath the Khufu and Menkaure pyramids as well, reaching depths of approximately two kilometers. The study marks a groundbreaking advancement in the understanding of the Giza Plateau’s underground complexity,
The discoveries surrounding the CFR Pyramid represent just the tip of a vast and complex structure beneath the Giza Plateau.If confirmed, this discovery could challenge mainstream Egyptology’s belief that the pyramids were simply royal tombs.
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