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(Image credit: NewsNation)

Below is the transcript of an interview I had just before midnight last night with the anchor Jesse Weber on NewsNation (accessible in video format here). Jesse’s questions are marked with JW and my answers with AL.

***

JW: Tonight, just a remarkable comment from Vice President JD Vance is putting the UFO debate back in the spotlight. So, in a recent interview, Vance was asked about the possibility of releasing more government files on UFOs, UAPs. He said, quote, we’re working on it. And then he added that he is obsessed with the topic, but it was his personal opinion on what UFOs, aliens might be that is getting the most attention. You see, Vance, who is Catholic, said he doesn’t necessarily believe these beings are from another planet. Instead, he says they could be demons.

Vance says that many world religions have long acknowledged the existence of what he described as weird things out there that are difficult to explain, and that is the lens he looks through when he hears about strange encounters. Now, remember, he’s not John Smith. He’s the vice president of the United States. Does he have some inside knowledge? And remember, the comments come as the Trump administration has signaled interest in releasing more information on UFOs and UAPs.

Now, no word of President Trump or any other members of the administration share Vance’s views, but how could I not talk about this? I want to bring in Avi Loeb, a theoretical physicist, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. Thank you so much.

So, my first question is as follows. When I was thinking about this, the Vice President… would he have been briefed on UFOs? Could his demon theory be shaped not just by his personal beliefs, by some things he’s seen, something he’s heard? What do you think?

AL: Well, thanks for having me. This is not new in the context of science and religion. We for example, now know, scientifically speaking, that the universe started in a Big Bang. We don’t know what happened before that. And that is a kind of theory that appeared in Genesis and has been the foundation for the Judeo-Christian religion in particular. And so, I don’t see necessarily a conflict between religious beliefs and science as long as everyone agrees that we should attend to the evidence. That should guide us.

Let’s figure out what these things are. And my guess is that in situations where there is a lot of uncertainty, for example, if the U.S. government cannot figure out what these objects are,

then, of course, people have their own speculations or theories or they connect it to some past traditional thoughts. I have no issue with that as long as everyone agrees that we should get more data and figure these things out.

At the end of the day, we might recognize this as something completely unexpected but we might also figure it out.

JW: I hear you right and I go back to the idea let’s say he saw heard something and it’s his interpretation of it that it has a religious context and its demons, but I think at the very least if we make this assumption in this theory. He may have saw or heard something that would suggest that whatever these beings or these phenomena are, are evil, right? That seems to be the very big narrative put out by pop culture. They’re evil, evil. Is it assumed too much that UAPs, UFOs, aliens are evil if we’re putting them in the demon context?

AL: Yeah, I do think that’s going too far because I am leading the Galileo Project. We built three observatories. We are looking up at millions of objects using machine learning, artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out if there are any outliers relative to the performance envelope of human-made technologies. And my thinking about it is not in the context of demons, but more in the context of aliens. And in that case, if we are seeing any extraterrestrial technologies, the way I think of them is as the better angels of our nature.

Why not be optimistic? We can learn from new technologies. We only had science and technology for a hundred years, and most stars formed billions of years before the Sun.

I should also mention that the latest interstellar visitor we had, 3I/ATLAS could have potentially released some probes or objects during its path.

And, in fact, there was a new report by the American Meteor Society (posted here) that there is a surge in the number of meteors on Earth over the past few months in the first

quarter of 2026. We should always look up.

JW: And you think that might be caused by 3I/ATLAS?

AL: It’s a possibility that I discussed in an essay on Medium.com, available here. I calculated that an ejection speed of only less than a few kilometers per second, which is completely reasonable of objects, even if it was a natural iceberg that fragmented, let’s say, a year ago or a decade ago, there was a cloud of debris around it. Fragments could have hit the Earth in recent months. That’s completely reasonable in terms of the numbers.

The question is whether 3I/ATLAS is technological and released some probes. That’s a completely separate question, because there you can have the fragments guided by technology. All I’m saying is we should be open-minded to the possibility that we’re not at the top of the food chain within the Milky Way galaxy, that we can learn something from siblings of our family of intelligent civilizations.

And of course, you may ask: how is religion supposed to be affected by any finding?

JW: Yeah.

AL: So, I had a visit to Harvard University where I’m a professor by a group of theologians led by the current president of the Templeton Foundation. And they asked me, how would our religious beliefs be affected by finding extraterrestrials?

And I said: “Look, I have two daughters. And when the second one was born, it didn’t take away any of the love that I have to the first one. And so, assuming that God is a parent that can attend to only one child is very limiting.”

JW: Yeah, that’s a good way, that’s a really good way to try to think about that. It makes sense because if we really do get more information, that may be ways people kind of process it and accept it. Avi Loeb, thank you for taking the time. Really appreciate it.

AL: Thanks for having me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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(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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