By
Avi Loeb Medium
(Image credit: Getty Images/HISTORY Channel)Below is the transcript of a Questions and Answers session that I had on April 13, 2026 with a class full of students in Sweden, taught by Professor Henrik Nordvall.
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Q: First, we will give you the chance to say a few words about yourself.
A: I haven’t changed much since I was a small child. I grew up on a farm and was interested mainly in nature. That’s pretty much what I am right now. I don’t care how many likes I get on social media, and my main focus is in trying to understand our cosmic environment, nature, without any prejudice, without assuming that we are at the top of the food chain.
Q: The first question relates to methods and technology and research practice. It’s kind of an umbrella category: which practical and methodological challenges are the most decisive when conducting research on unidentified phenomena, such as in the Galileo Project?
A: The most important thing is to pay attention to anomalies, which are behaviors that do not line up with what we expect. And you might say, well, it’s obvious if there is something that we don’t expect. Everyone would be curious to know what it is, but that’s not the case.
If you spend some time in academia, what you would find is that most scientists worry about their reputation. They do not want to take risks. And they often build their stature and self-esteem on past knowledge. So, they know that every object in the sky must be either a rock or an iceberg, an asteroid or a comet. And so, as a result of that, even if the object does not behave like a rock, they would say, well, it’s a dark comet. It’s a rock of a type that we’ve never seen before, but it’s still a rock. Now, I should say it’s not just the problem of comet experts.
It’s also true of any branch of science including fundamental physics or cosmology, because right now we don’t know what 95% of the content of the universe is. We give it a name; we call it dark matter. This is matter that is invisible. We call it dark energy. This is energy that is invisible. We have no idea what it is. Both of these. And, you know, for the past century or so, we’ve been searching for clues that will tell us what it is, but we call it matter and energy. Why do we label it matter and energy? Because then we feel comfortable that we pretty much understand what these things are. They’re just a different form of matter, a different form of energy. But just think about these names. It may be neither of these. It may be just modified gravity. It may well be that the way we describe gravity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, is incomplete. And because of that, we have these ghosts. We believe that there are dark matter and dark energy, even though it’s just a modified form of gravity. We use equations that are not adequate, and therefore we infer these additional components. But we haven’t found what they are. So, by labeling these components as matter and energy, cosmologies feel comfortable and then they don’t even consider seriously the possibility of modified gravity.
And for the same reason, when the 1st interstellar object, `Oumuamua, was identified, it was cataloged as a `dark comet’ because it showed non-gravitational acceleration but there was no gas or dust around it. So, they called it a dark comet because the typical signature of a comet, which is a tale of gas and dust, was not found. So, instead of saying this is an anomalous object, they said it’s a dark comet.
So, you can see how scientists cheat. You might say scientists should be curious and therefore when they see something that doesn’t line up with what they expect, they would immediately flag it and study it and try to figure out what it is. But no, the way they think about it is they already know the answer. It’s a comet. We don’t see evidence for a comet and so we call it a dark comet. It’s matter, we don’t see evidence for that matter, we call it dark matter. And the same with dark energy. And this is a trick being used for decades by mainstream scientists to indicate that it’s not a crisis. In fact, people get a Nobel Prize for identifying how much dark matter and how much dark energy are needed, just for doing the counting and saying how much are we missing. They get a Nobel Prize, and everyone says: “Wow, look at that. Such an accomplishment in cosmology. We had figured out how much dark matter exists. But we don’t know what it is. That’s the truth.
So, the point of the kind of research that I’m doing is to stay honest. If we see an anomaly, what it should do is trigger an interest in collecting more data about it so that we can figure it out. That’s the only way to gain new knowledge. It’s not by giving names to unknown things. If you call a zebra an elephant, you don’t make it an elephant. You just gave it a name of something that it’s not. The key is to make progress in our knowledge by collecting data. That’s the only way we can make progress. And that’s the approach that I’m taking with the Galileo Project. And by the way, if I had an infinite amount of money, I would allocate it to studying anomalies and doing the best I can to figure out their nature. So that’s basically the approach that I’m taking.
Q: Right. I have a couple of questions that that are connected to this. What kinds of evidence would lead you to consider an object such as an asteroid or a comet fragment as being a possible techno signature? And what broader scientific questions, could such a discovery help answer?
A: If I had the the ability to collect the best data possible, then obviously there is a very simple thing that I would like to have, which is a close-up photograph of the object or some material sample from it, because if you have a close-up photograph or you actually get close to an object, you can tell if it’s a rock or a spacecraft. Any person can do that. The only way to deny that it might be something else is by not having enough evidence. If we are in a situation of uncertainty, and we see an object that behaves in ways that we do not understand; for example it displays non-gravitational acceleration without a cometary tail, and you don’t know how it’s maneuvering, and you don’t have an image of it; then you can say: “well, it’s a rock of a type that I’ve never seen before,” which is what the experts are saying. And so, the only way to figure it out is to actually get a high-resolution image, which in principle will immediately tell us what the object is. Or you can look for some additional signatures of technology. For example, artificial lights. If the object has artificial lights and is not just reflecting sunlight, then that would be a clear technological signature. If we see the object maneuvering in ways that cannot be explained, with accelerations far greater than we expect for any comet. An object that wants to stay within the solar system will come into the solar system and could stop, by braking. That would be a clear technological signature. There are lots of those. And in terms of materials, obviously we can tell the difference between stainless steel and rocky material, right?
In September 2020, there was an object that was identified by the same telescope in Hawaii that discovered `Oumuamua, the 1st interstellar object. The observers saw a new object which they labeled 2020 SO, and realized that it’s being pushed by reflecting sunlight. Really strange. They collected the spectrum of this object and found that it’s made of stainless steel. And then they realized: oh, wait a minute, this object is actually a rocket booster, an upper stage of a surveyor lunar lander. They realized that NASA launched this object in 1966 and it is technological. And then, of course, they never wrote a paper about it. Because why would they discuss an object that happens to be technological that NASA launched? But think of what would happen if the same object would have been manufactured by another civilization. What would they do? It is not clear that they would follow on it and conclude that this is actually technological because they don’t know who launched it and it looks like it’s moving along a path that we’ve never launched an object into. So, they might continue to classify it as a dark comet.
Q: How do you interpret objects such as `Oumuamua and 3I/ATLAS, and what features make them scientifically unusual or significant in your view?
A: Both objects showed anomalies, but none of the anomalies was conclusive in flagging a technological origin. So, I defined a new Loeb Classification Scale in July 2025 after 3I/ATALS was discovered. This is a classification scale of interstellar objects where 0 implies a natural object and 10 implies a technological object of potential threat to humanity. alien technology. I gave both of 1I/`Oumuamua and 3I/ATLAS a rank of order 4 because they showed anomalies, but these anomalies were not conclusively technological.
In the case of `Oumuamua, it was the fact that it had an extreme shape. As it was tumbling every 8 hours, the amount of sunlight reflected from the object changed by a factor of 10. And that meant that the object had an extreme shape, where one axis is at least 10 times longer than the other axis projected on the sky. In addition, the object was pushed away from the sun by some mysterious force without showing any cometary outgassing. So, I suggested that it may be pushed away from the Sun by reflecting sunlight. That was consistent with the decline of this non-gravitational acceleration, inversely with the square of the distance from the Sun. But that required that the object be extremely thin and flat. And nature doesn’t make such objects, so I suggested it may be technological. Just like 2020 SO, the previous object I had mentioned, which was discovered 3 years later. These were the main anomalies of `Oumuamua. There were some others, but these were the main ones.
For 3I/ATLAS, there were other anomalies. It was much bigger than `Oumuamua, at least a factor of 10 or so, which means a factor of a 1,000 or more in mass. And that means that we should have seen, many more `Oumuamua-like objects for any object as big as 3I/ATLAS, which we did not. 3I/ATLAS also arrived within 5 degrees of the plane of the planets around the Sun. And the chance of that happening at random is 1 in 500. It also didn’t show a standard commentary tail, but had an anti-tail; namely a jet pointed towards the Sun rather than away from the Sun. And it had an abundance of deuterium that is 1000 times higher than the mean cosmic abundance. It had biological markers in the form of methane and other organic molecules. It had a system of 3 jets coming from its nucleus that are equally spaced on the sky by 120 degrees and unusual for pockets of ice on the surface of a rock. It also displayed nickel with very little iron. Usually, nickel and iron have a similar abundance in astrophysical objects, but not in industrial production of nickel alloys.
3I/ATLAS displayed very different anomalies than `Oumuamua; some of them were geometric, some of them had to do with composition. But again, one can say: “well, it’s an extremely rare and unusual object. So, we might have been lucky that it came this way.” I listed 22 anomalies in a recent summary essay on this object, posted here.
Q: Is our search for extraterrestrial life necessarily limited to bio-signatures or techno-signatures, or should we remain open to the possibility that extraterrestrial life might take forms that do not fit our standard assumptions?
A: Of course. The way I approach it is to search for things that are not familiar. I’m not trying to imagine that they use the radio communication approach that we developed a century ago. That’s what the SETI community has been focusing on for the past 65 years. And I think it’s misguided to keep searching for a very primitive mode of communication that we developed at the beginning of our technological evolution. When you keep looking and you’re not finding anything, that’s not a good practice to keep doing the same thing, expecting a different result.
In my view, we should approach it differently. Looking for a package in our mailbox is very different than waiting for a phone call. And so that’s the approach I’m taking with the Galileo Project.
And I also wrote papers about searching for artificial lights on the night side of exoplanets. When an exoplanet goes around the star, one hemisphere is illuminated by the starlight, and the opposite hemisphere is dark. And so, if you monitor the light reflected from the planet, you can tell at which phase it is along its orbit, just like the phases of the Moon. But if there is artificial light on the night side, or there is heat produced on the night side which is otherwise cold, you might be able to detect it as additional light that has nothing to do with the illumination by the star. So that’s a different techno signature. Another is to search for industrial pollution in the atmosphere of exoplanets, and I wrote the 1st paper that quantified that with my student and a post-doc a decade ago. There are various molecules that we produce industrially, and if another civilization might wish to purposely put a blanket of pollution in its atmosphere so that the planet — which is otherwise too cold — will get warmer. It’s a clear technological signature because these molecules are not produced by nature, the kind of CFCs is that we produce with our industries. Any there are more ways to search for technological. You can search for mega-structures around the habitable regions of stars.
Unfortunately, the SETI community is too traditional. They keep doing what they were doing and recently started to follow the community of astrobiology. The focus of the mainstream is to search for the molecular fingerprints of life on exoplanets by seeking specific molecules in their atmospheres, like oxygen, methane, water, or carbon dioxide. However, even if we find those molecules, it will not be a conclusive fingerprint of life because the same molecules could be produced by geological processes that do not involve life. The astrobiology community is locked on investing more than ten billion dollars over the next 2 decades on developing the Habitable World Observatory. But nearly zero federal funding is allocated to the search for technological signatures, and I don’t think that’s wise. Even though microbes might be far more abundant, the signatures of technology could be easier to identify. And if we if we find tech signatures, then we would have not only evidence for life, but also for intelligence.
Q: Which technological breakthroughs or new tools do you see as crucial for future progress in this field of study or interest?
A: It depends on which signature one is looking for. In the context of interstellar objects, for example, trying to see if any of them might be technological. And by the way, I should say rocks that arrive into the solar system randomly from outer space, but technological probes may arrive preferentially to the inner part of the solar system for the same reason that bees are clustered around flowers. They might have a larger concentration around resources they are interested in. The habitable region might be of interest to them for some reason. And so the abundance of probes that we see are not representative of the average abundance in interstellar space, because we reside in the habitable zone of the Sun.
This requires monitoring the sky for incoming objects. Right now, we have the Rubin Observatory in Chile that is monitoring the southern sky with a 3.2 gigapixel camera, and the hope is that it will discover dozens of interstellar objects in the coming decade. But we don’t have a survey telescope in the northern sky and there is a plan for the Argus array, which will do the same there. So having both survey telescopes to cover the entire sky would be essential.
And then the question is: how do we get a high-resolution image of an object? For that, we need the much bigger telescope than currently available on Earth or in space. For example, we can build an optical interferometer on the Moon that is at least 100 meters in diameter. That could resolve the image of an object like 3I/ATLAS from the Moon without a flyby near the object.
Finally, we need to design interceptors. These are space missions that could cross the path of incoming interstellar objects of interest, get much more data about them, and potentially also mitigate the risk if they happen to be heading towards Earth. This might become a high priority if we identify a technological object from outside the solar system. If we had a high-resolution image of an interstellar object, and we realize that it is technological, we should have a contingency plan for how to intercept it.
Also, if we happen to notice a very interesting iceberg, it would make sense to land on it and bring materials back to Earth, because then we can check the materials for any building blocks of life as we know it. And that’s a completely different approach to astrobiology that is not recognized. I’m the only one advocating for that. Nobody is discussing it among astrobiologists. This approach is very different than building a huge telescope to look at the atmosphere of an exoplanet and figure out whether it has molecules that are indicative of life. Here we are examining material that came from another star far away. And the only reason we can do that is because there was this interstellar object that spent billions of years traveling through interstellar space from the parent star and arrived to our backyard. Ee should take advantage of that. I cannot understand how astrobiologists are not excited about this opportunity with interstellar objects as a new path to finding whether the material in planetary disks around other stars has the ingredients for life as we know it.
Q: What you hope to recover from the ocean in the Galileo project or future similar projects and how would such a finding relate to the hypothesis of extraterrestrial life or possible technical signatures?
A: In June 2023, I led an expedition to the Pacific Ocean aiming to recover materials from the 1st recognized interstellar meteor that exploded there in 2014 based on data from US government sensors. Ee went there and collected materials from the bottom of the ocean. There will be a Netflix documentary about it. I encourage all of you to check it out when it comes out, hopefully this year. At first, we analyze the chemical composition of the materials and found that about 10% of the molten droplets or spherules that we identified within the original material, has a chemical composition very different from solar system materials. There was an enhancement in some elements of like beryllium, lanthanum or uranium, by up to a factor of 1,000 relative to solar system materials. More recently, we engaged in additional studies of isotopes. I should also note that we recovered only molten droplets that are less than a millimeter in size, so we can’t tell the nature of the object. We cannot infer if this meteor is a Voyager-like probe or just a rock that came from another star. Obviously, most likely, it’s a rock, but to figure out that it’s natural — we have to get a sample of bigger fragments because the fragments that we retrieved were melted by the fireball of the explosion, when this object entered the earth’s atmosphere.
Q: What concrete results have you achieved so far in your projects and is there any finding that has been particularly surprising or emotionally significant?
A: By the way, I’m not driven by emotion. Significance for me is evidence. Although you might say that searching for a partner in our cosmic neighborhood is the most romantic search in science. But this is a blind date of interstellar proportions, meaning that we don’t know what will be on the other side. The only thing is I’m aiming high. When I went dating at a young age before I met my wife, I was trying to find someone who is more intelligent than I am. But what my fellow astrobiologists are doing is aim low. They say that microbes are far more abundant, so let’s search for them. It’s just like going on dates and saying that since mediocre partners are far more abundant, we should search for a mediocre partner. I don’t think that’s the right attitude. I want to find something that will give us inspiration, an encounter that would reveal new levels of science and technology, that could bring us to a better place. That’s the kind of partner I want to find. So even if mediocre partners are far more abundant, I would never marry one of those.
We cannot imagine what may be out there because our experience is limited to this Earth, and to only one century of modern science and technology. Aliens may represent our future if there are a thousand years, a million years, a billion years more advanced than we are. We have no idea how they might look like. And so, our imagination is limited. I don’t care what script writers in Hollywood imagine. It’s probably very different. Actually, Steven Spielberg, when I met him one time, said: “Please tell me if you find anything. Let me be the first to know.” He also recognizes that his imagination is limited.
All in all, you know, we should be open-minded and hope for something more advanced and collect data that would educate us about it.
Q: If you made a groundbreaking discovery, how would you choose to communicate it? Would you do it through traditional scientific channels or faster and more public forums? Or would you just call Steven Spielberg?
A: One thing is clear. I also would not waste any time going to Stockholm in your country. Why would I go to a Nobel cocktail party, dressed up, and waste my time in chatting with people, when I can actually learn more about our cosmic neighbors? That’s far more fascinating. So, I will actually follow Bob Dylan in just ignoring the phone call from the Nobel committee if I get one from Stockholm.
But coming back to your previous question, I should say that we are currently within the Galileo Project at a very important phase where we are measuring distances to objects in the sky. We have three observatories that we constructed. Measuring distances allows us to infer the velocity and acceleration of objects that that appear as outliers relative to human made technologies. With respect to expeditions for materials from interstellar objects, we have identified another interstellar meteor from 2022. I would love to go and search for its materials off the coast of Peru. This expedition will cost about six million dollars and at the moment we are seeking potential funders. The funder could join us onboard the ship.
Q: How is this type of research funded and which actors have an interest in the results? Do you see any patterns among interest parties?
A: We are funded in part by foundations that are interested in the research. For example, most recently, the Templeton Foundation’s president visited me and said that he would like his Foundation to be involved with any discoveries we make. So, he provided a generous donation to the Galileo project, which I’m grateful for. We were also funded independently to construct an observatory on top of Sphere in Las Vegas which is the largest entertainment center in the world, about 100-meters in height, and we placed a Galileo Observatory on top of it. Timothy Chalamet, the main actor of a ping-pong player in a recent movie called Marty Supreme, filmed the promo for the movie on top of Sphere when it was lit up as a giant ping-pong ball. If you look at the promo images, you would see the Galileo Observatory next to him. The newspaper articles about the promo said that he was the first person to stand on top of Sphere, but it cannot be true because our observatories were put there half a year before he went there. This is an example for funding that we receive from individuals in addition to foundations that, because these individuals have interest in the research that we are doing. At the moment, we are not receiving any funding from federal agencies, which in a way gives us freedom to do the research with no strings attached.
Q: How do security interests and military involvement affect the research, if at all?
A: Frankly, I find any human-made objects boring. And that means that what the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies are interested in, which are human-made technologies that might be produced by adversarial nations, is completely uninteresting for me. I’m happy to give them all the data that relates to human-made objects. But I would hope that in return, I’ll receive some data from them that cannot be assigned to human-made technologies.
Actually, tomorrow is a soft deadline for a request for the Pentagon to release 46 videos of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) based on a request letter submitted by Representative Anna Paulina Luna. I don’t know which fraction of these videos will be released but we might know more tomorrow, or maybe the deadline will be extended. I am hoping to meet Representative Luna and speak with her about it. But the idea is that if government has anomalous data that can be declassified, that would be of great interest to scientists like myself, and I’ll be happy to help government figure out the nature of these unusual objects. That includes videos of objects maneuvering in ways that we don’t understand, or it could even include materials from crash sites of such objects.
You can understand why the government would be the first to notice UAP. This is because most astronomers use telescopes that are focused on a small part of the sky and are interested in very distant sources of light. They ignore anything close to Earth. So, astronomers will not find rare UAP, but the government that monitors the sky for national security purposes would be the first to notice them after monitoring the sky for many decades with the best equipment. The military and intelligence agencies also have a much larger budget than astronomers. So, they might be the first to notice unusual things, and they would keep the data classified because it was collected by classified sensors, and they don’t want adversarial nations to know about the capabilities of these sensors. And also, if they are unable to figure out what these objects are, they don’t want to show their vulnerability in terms of not being able to figure out things that they’re observing. For those reasons, it is obvious why such data would be classified. But my hope is that if government has data from a long time ago that is irrelevant to the battlefield today, or they have data that cannot be explained by human-made technologies for sure — they might just put it out this data a degraded form. I’ll be happy to look into it.
Q: How do you assess the credibility of the testimonies and the information presented. For example, in the US Congressional hearings on UAP.
A: Science is based on the collection of data by instruments, and you might ask why. The answer is simple. Look at the judicial system, which is attending to reports by humans. There are convicts who were put on death row, about to be executed. And then came evidence from DNA tests that indicated that they are innocent and they were exonerated. What does that tell you? It implies that people were testifying under oath, being absolutely sure that they are telling the truth. But these people were wrong. How is that possible? Well, if you are ever involved in a car accident, then when the police officers come along and ask the different parties involved in the car accident: “what happened?”, they get very different reports. People cannot be trusted. Why? Because they have a biased view of reality. They have wishful thinking. And they have an agenda sometimes. That was a lesson learned from history when Galileo looked through his telescope and saw moons orbiting Jupiter, and then was put in house arrest by the Vatican which had a different opinion. In 1992, the Vatican admitted that Galileo was right, but he was already 350 years dead. And what that tells you is that people have a lot of reasons for saying things. Obviously, the young people here know that from social media. If they use a dating app, they should not believe most of the profiles displayed there. Right? And so, the point is that people are not scientific instruments. When people tell you: “I’m absolutely convinced that something happened”, you might not believe them even if they are completely sincere about it, because someone told them or they thought they saw something that did not exist, or all kinds of circumstances might lead them to say something that is not real.
Therefore, eyewitness testimonies from people who worked in government who say that they know about programs, are not sufficient for me as a scientist. They are intriguing in the sense that I believe those people. They are probably very sincere in what that’s saying, but the testimonies by themselves do not hold water, so to speak. I would like to see the actual evidence. I want to see the data. I want to see if there is material evidence. It’s very simple. And that’s a very elementary request. Obviously, it’s sufficient to see one thing. I’m not asking for dozens of different objects. I just want one. If you have one clear piece of evidence, that’s it. We’re done. If we want to convince ourselves that we are not alone, that there is someone else out there, just one piece of evidence beyond any reasonable doubt, collected by instruments or representing material evidence that we can examine in laboratory, would be sufficient. So just give me one thing. I don’t need 46 videos, dozens of reports. I just want one.
Q: If a verified discovery of extraterrestrial life or technology were made, how do you think governments and authorities would act? Do you believe there are any contingency plans for this type of discovery?
A: Some people claim that the government authorities already have evidence, and they have a plan or that are discussing how to release the data. That is called the process of disclosure, and they would do it gradually by first asking Steven Spielberg to release the movie Disclosure Day in June 2026 in order to prepare the public mentally. They might be worried that disclosure will disrupt the financial markets, that it will induce societal unrest. Governments have their authority because they promise their citizens that they can protect them. But in case there is a threat from alien technology that governments have no way of protecting their citizens against, there will be societal unrest. And all kinds of crazies will start going running down the street and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. And so that may be one reason for releasing such information gradually.
However, the way I think of this is that if you were to go to the backyard of your home and you found a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor, and then at the dinner table you would insist not to release that information to your family members, then I don’t think it’s a good practice because the neighbor is still out there. You know about it because you found the tennis ball among the rocks in your backyard. So, you know that there is something out there. And that neighbor may knock on the front door one day or may affect the lives of your family members. It makes very little sense to hold this information away from humanity. We are all in the same boat. We should know whether we have neighbors in our cosmic street. For the same reason that the Vatican was not supposed to censor the information that Galileo Galilei revealed with his telescope, we should not censor or keep under wraps the information that alien tech might be visiting us.
The fundamental question is whether the authorities actually have that information. If government does get access to such information or if through the Galileo Project I get access to it, the ultimate goal must be to share it with all humans. I see more benefit out of disclosure than negative repercussions, because we will recalibrate what we think about reality, and then we will start adapting to it. It’s like any other disruption. We developed advanced AI recently and AI is also very disruptive to society. Many of the people on this call may not have job opportunities that they were hoping to have because of AI. And what do you do about it? Do you just avoid the bad news to those young people who may not have a job of the type that they were dreaming about? For example, there are little future prospects for coders, people who write computer codes. In my generation, there were many people that invested their career in code writing, but we are obligated to tell aspiring coders about that job risk in the age of AI. Why? Because then they will adapt to the new reality and do something else. If you avoid the bad news, these people would make career mistakes that would harm them in the future. In my view, it is always good to know the reality that you live in. You must be sober to realize what the facts are and then decide how to adapt to them, how to cope with them. That’s the better approach. If you deny the reality by having magical thinking, your future will be worse. By the way, even rational people, business people or scientists, sometimes prefer to have magical thinking. Steve Jobs had pancreatic cancer but refused conventional medical treatment for it for nine months during which he utilized dietary changes, juice fasting and consultation with a psychic while the tumor was growing and spreading. He later expressed regret over this decision since it shortened his lifespan.
Q: What does the scientific criticism of this research look like in general? And are there particular disciplines or groups that are more skeptical? And how do you respond to that criticism?
A: Over the years, I wrote more than a thousand scientific papers. I started in cosmology, which is the study of the universe at large. And now I’m doing some work related to objects near Earth that could be comets or asteroids. What I can say is that the community of scholars working on cosmology is more like a community of chess players. They think abstractly and strategically, they appreciate original thoughts and because they don’t know the answer to many things, like the nature of dark matter and dark energy. They appreciate innovative thoughts that can be tested experimentally. They are not very dogmatic. However, astronomers who focus on studying rocks or icebergs in space make a community that resembles mud wrestlers more than chess players. The thing is that I don’t want to get dirty, so I don’t mud wrestle. Why do I say mud wrestling? Because they would basically bring you to the ground. Get you into the mud, and make sure that your voice is not heard just in order to preserve their prejudice that an object must be a rock of a type that they’ve never seen before and nothing else. I have many examples to report about, including by reviewers and editors of journals, but I will not waste your time on that because I prefer to focus on positive things. Some of these critics want to bring me to a negative mindset where I would focus on them because they have nothing better to do than to criticize. You might ask, why are terrorists sometimes more effective than governments? It is because in order to destroy something you don’t need to do a lot. You just need to put an explosive and destroy a building. But to create this building, you need to put a huge amount of work. Destroying is much easier than building. That’s why terrorist groups are effective, because they can destroy with very little effort. And therefore, they get a lot of attention. For the same reason, you can think about the construction of new concepts or ideas or scientific programs. It’s much easier to destroy those. How do you destroy them? First of all, you argue that there is no basis for this research project, that is completely unfounded, that in fact an interstellar meteor was actually a mistake made by the U.S. government. It’s not real, and maybe it actually happened somewhere else, and maybe the materials that were collected by the Galileo Project are just human-made materials, and maybe it was just a truck that passed near that side that gave the impression that there was a meteor there, but it was not really there. It was somewhere else. And you can just throw a lot of dust in the air and say that you don’t see anything. And that is done by people who don’t want any discussion on the possibility that an interstellar meteor might have been discovered. If this effort is not sufficiently effective, what they will do is take it to a second level where they would attack me personally and say bad things about me. You might say, if this is done by accomplished scientists, criticism is a fair game. But most of the people who write bad things and making negative YouTube videos with personal statements about me, are those who were not good enough to get an academic position. These are people who dropped out of academia. One of them calls himself a professor, even though he never held any professorship, not to speak about tenure track position or advanced research position. He dropped out of academia but calls himself a professor and then talks about me negatively. How dare he do that without practicing science? He is just a blogger on YouTube that gets attention by attacking me without doing anything productive. You just need to look at the resume of people who gain visibility in the public’s eye and ask: did they publish a single scientific paper over the past decade? Why should we trust them in telling us what science needs to be like? I am a practicing scientist. I published several new papers every month, and these people are telling me how to do science. It’s really ridiculous these days that people can get a lot of attention for pretending to represent science, even though they don’t have the credentials for being practicing scientists, and they throw mud at people who are practicing science like myself. I asked myself, how dare they do that? But that’s the reality of social media, a very unfortunate reality of misinformation. There are also people who created YouTube channels starting in November 2025 with content being spoken in my voice and in my image, AI-generated fake YouTube videos. Because of that, I decided three months ago to create my own YouTube channel just in order to fight those fake videos. These agents of misinformation are mudding the waters and people who watch them have a hard time deciding whether their content is authentic or misinformation. And it’s really an unfortunate part of the online culture that we have right now.
Q: What’s your favorite depiction of extraterrestrial in pop culture?
A: I don’t like science fiction. I like science and I enjoy fiction, but not the mix of the two because the storyline often violates the laws of physics and I feel uneasy about those violations. But an artist named Greg Wyatt, one the most accomplished sculptor in the US, delivered two bronze sculptures of Galileo Galilei and fifty-one watercolors that he created to my office at Harvard. But the biggest gift that he awarded me was the foundation for a new sculpture. He gave me plastelina, which is this material that you can use to make the shape of an intended sculpture that will eventually be cast in bronze. And I decided to call my new sculpture “The Alien”. I crafted a body of an alien by imagining what would an ideal body, better than the human body, look like. One thing I regret, for example, is that I don’t have a third eye because I cannot look backwards. It would have been great if we could see backwards as well, right? So, I put a 3rd eye for this alien and I put also wings so that the alien would be able to fly in a gaseous atmosphere. And I put a third leg which gives a more stable posture for the alien and I put some electronic or technological components in the alien body. Altogether, I created a model of an alien and Greg just sent me two days ago four photographs of this sculpture which is now made in red wax, and then eventually it will be cast in bronze. This is my first sculpture, a very different image of an alien than you find in science fiction movies. But that’s what my imagination produces. And once the bronze sculpture is done, I’ll be glad to show you how it looks. The images of the wax version are available on my recent post here.
Q: How do you think pop culture representations influence our view of extraterrestrial life? Like, for example, the idea that they would be humanoid and they would be similar to us.
A: I think pop culture affected a lot. It also affected testimonies of potential pilots that may have been retrieved along with materials from crash sites. But I would be really surprised if these imagined humanoid figures represent reality because if they arrived from a distant star, then the trip must have been very long, and biological bodies are not designed to survive such a long journey, while being exposed to energetic particles, cosmic rays. Just going to a low-gravity environment removes about 1.5% per month of the bone mass in our body and that means if we stay for several years on the Moon, our body would crumble, not to speak about the exposure to cosmic rays and micrometeorites without the protection of an atmosphere. A micrometeorite hit would pierce through our body like a bullet. Small micrometeorites burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere so we don’t think about the risk from them. The Earth’s atmosphere is like a womb, protecting us from a lot of the risks in outer space, such as cosmic rays and micrometeorites. All in all, the human body is not suitable for long distance travel, despite what you see in science fiction movies like “Project Hail Mary” — where a human survives a long trip to another star — making very little sense. I believe that sending robots with AI would make much more sense because they will not get bored during the journey, their material structure will be sustainable for long trips and they would not suffer in a low gravity environment. Therefore, if I imagine an alien visit my guess is that it involves a craft or probe being controlled by artificial intelligence, not by natural intelligence. That is why I’m a little bit skeptical about humanoids.
Q: How do how do you interpret recurring descriptions of UFOs with strong lights on them? Could such lights serve a function if they were extraterrestrial crafts, or do they rather suggest natural phenomena that have been misinterpreted like ball lightning of charged clouds?
A: One has to deal with each case on its merit, and most importantly, we need to know the distance of what we are seeing, and that would allow us to infer the speed and the acceleration. So, without distance information, it’s really difficult to tell because you can have something flying close to the camera that would look like a fast-moving object at a large distance. But if you have a second camera separated from the first one, then you will be able to tell that the object does not appear in both cameras or if it does appear, you can infer the distance. It’s really the quality of the data that matters. You can’t make general statements. So far, I haven’t seen conclusive evidence for alien technology. I would love to see the most intriguing cases that the US government or anyone else may have, and analyze that data. If there is a clear-cut case, it would be a learning experience. Most of the scientific community does not invest in this kind of research, and that is inappropriate given that the government talks about things it cannot identify and the public cares so much about it. So, our duty as scientists is to figure it out. At the very least, we will help the government figure out things that they cannot, and it will be important for national security. But of course, if we find something that is non-human made, then that would be a huge leap forward for humanity.
Q: How do you view recurring reports of an anomalous phenomenon in the ocean? And is there anything you find particularly interesting or underestimated in these reports? If you know about them.
A: We have more information about the surface of the moon than we have about the bottom of the oceans on Earth. It’s quite possible that there are surprising things down there, especially because there are reports on objects that go from the water to air or back in ways that are really anomalous. It’s possible the U.S. government has more data on that, and I would love to see it. It’s certainly a subject that is worth attending to.
Q: In conclusion, do you have anything you’d like to tell the students in this class who may have a scientific interest for studying UAP?
A: Well, my advice is very simple. Stay true to your childhood curiosity, and ignore people who pretend to be the adults in the room. Because as soon as there will be conclusive data, indicating perhaps that there are alien technological objects within the solar system, as soon as the data will be clear, everyone will start saying: “of course, we suspected that, we talked about it. There is nothing really new here. Look, I actually mentioned it before”, and it will become a common knowledge at that point. That’s what happened with the idea that the Earth moves around the Sun. By now, it’s impossible to deny it and so the Vatican is onboard. But it took many centuries for that to happen. And the best way to stay ignorant is by claiming that there is nothing to study, that in fact we should not invest any funds in the search, in the study of anomalies, because anomalies can be shoved under the rug of conventional thinking. And that’s what the people who pretend to be the adults in the room often say. They tell kids: “I know the answer to your question. There is no need to check it.” But the beauty of being a child or having a beginner’s mind — and by the way I’m 64 years old so biologically I’m definitely not a child but the way I think is still like a child — the benefit of being with a mindset of a child or a beginner is that you say: “Well, you are telling me that this round object is just a beach ball. Let me go and check, so the kid goes to the object and turns it around, checks it out. That’s what the kid does because that’s the process of learning while the adult says: “I don’t have to go and check it. I know what it is.” That’s the approach of someone who pretends to be the adult in the room, but my point is that adults with this mindset will never discover something that fundamentally shakes their worldview. Whereas if you maintain your childhood curiosity, you might be the one to deliver news to humanity. And so that’s a great privilege. It sounds like it’s really a dangerous thing to do to behave like a child, but in fact it’s a great privilege. Somehow, when people become adults, they deny themselves from having the privilege to behave that way. And when I speak to adults, I can see the child in them. Every adult, has some spark of childhood curiosity but they suppress it. They suppress it and that’s why they develop gray hair. That’s why they’re frustrated and not happy with their life. I bring them the news that they can be free of these chains. They don’t need to develop gray hair and a grudge as they get older. They can stay curious. Why is that so difficult?
Q: Thank you very much for answering our questions, so passionately. So fascinating to listen to and we are very grateful for your time and generously answering all those questions. Looking forward to perhaps inviting you again in the future.
A: I hope to have some exciting new evidence to show you within a year.
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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