Harvard is Studying UFOs (Ft. Avi Loeb)

false flag incidents to basically create the conditions for war and more defense funding. Repeated acts of a violence against the armed forces of the United States must be met. So, would the government have any reason to make us believe that aliens exist and that they mean us harm? Absolutely. The prospect of the plot of Independence Day playing out in real life is a pretty persuasive psyop of all time, I just don't see UFOs as a false flag. My main reasoning for

Wrong. Enter Harvard astronomer Dr. Avi Good to see you, Jesse. We are trying to basically build our own observatories that are designed for the purpose of figuring out the nature of those unusual objects that were identified by the military. With the Galileo Project, he's putting optical, radar, magnetic, infrared, and audio sensors on top of Harvard's observatory in order to gain more conclusive and publicly available data on UAPs. With billions of years in galaxies on his

and borrow gloves and look like the Michelin Man for this entire interview. In this wide-ranging interview, we go deep on the Galileo Project and its aims. We discuss 'Oumuamua, the mysterious interstellar object in 2017 that opened Avi up to the possibility of extraterrestrial life. And we talk about how vitally important it is that serious scientists in academia begin to look into this fundamental question. Now, before we blast off into the ether, I do have to warn you that aliens don't take kindly to non-subscribers of American

Alchemy. So, hit that red button, flip on the notifications, sit back, relax, and enjoy this conversation with the ever curious ambassador of scientific wonder, this week's American Alchemist Dr. Avi Loeb. different activities. But you know that, don't you? Maybe you should interview me.

sending our technological kids in the form of equipment with artificial intelligence. And if we can imagine sending those AI systems that currently drive cars into space in the form of AI astronauts, then maybe other civilizations have done that already. Feels like the government has a very curious relationship to UAPs. I am here to discuss the so-called flying saucers. From 1947 to 1952, there seemed to be a general open-mindedness

on the part of the US government when it came to exploring UFOs. The Air Force even established its own UFO investigation program called Operation Blue Book. Known crashes like those at Trinity and Roswell and sightings like that of Kenneth Arnold only served to make people in and around government more convinced that there might be something there. Then something pretty insane happened. There were an overwhelming series of sightings in Washington, D.C. in July of 1952. The event made headline national news and was dubbed the invasion of Washington.

popularity? And I I I find you very interesting because you know, it's not like you're you're jumping on some trend. Really it's the Oumuamua inquiry for you that kind of got you into this sort of study. Which also happened in 2017, October, a couple of months before That's fascinating. Okay, well, that's really interesting. Yeah, so why is this so in the zeitgeist now? Well, I don't know, you know, I you can think of me just as a farm boy that is curious. And for me the appearance of Oumuamua triggered the interest in the subject. In 2017, the Pan-STARRS telescope in

Hawaii discovered a fast-traveling object in space called Oumuamua. It was given the name Oumuamua because it means in the Hawaiian language a scout, uh, a messenger from far away. Yeah. The interstellar object was about the size of a football field and didn't fit any of our known criteria for asteroids or comets. Most strikingly, it didn't have a cometary tail, a space rock's form of propulsion. It also changed speed All of the proposals that were put on the table to explain the anomalies of

Oumuamua invoked a rock of a type that we've never seen I always think about a caveman, what would have happened if a caveman would find a cell phone? The caveman would argue that the cell phone must be a rock of a type that never seen before. And if the caveman is not curious, Yeah. he would throw away the rock, and that would be the end of it. Well, that's a really interesting clip cuz it's like the Arthur C. Clarke any sufficiently advanced technology

looks like magic. In some cases, any sufficiently advanced technology looks mundane. Yes. Scientists made many guesses as to what it could be. A chunk of frozen nitrogen, a cloud of hydrogen, or a dust cloud. But all of these theories had holes in them. So, Dr. Loeb had a new theory that the object was a light sail, a thin structure that used the reflection of sunlight to propel itself forward. But there's only one problem with that. Nature doesn't make such thin solid Yes. A length-to-width ratio of above

three is almost never seen in an asteroid. So, Avi speculated that maybe Oumuamua was intelligently designed, and he even wrote a fantastic book on it called Extraterrestrial. Needless to say, he received a lot of backlash from his peers, but Avi held his ground. Many of my colleagues in academia still say it's extraordinary to even consider that there is another intelligent civilization out there. Then came some very interesting possible vindication for Dr. Avi Loeb. In September of 2020, Pan-STARRS found another object that was

similarly baffling. Like Oumuamua, it was traveling away from the sun. It didn't have any cometary tail or visible propulsion. Turns out we now know that object was intelligently designed technological equipment. The only thing is, it was ours. A forgotten rocket booster from a 1966 NASA mission that, you guessed it, uses sunlight to propel itself. So, if humans can build light sails, why can't extraterrestrials? I can see a better future for science if some of the analysis would be done by AI

systems because AI systems will not be attached to their ego. You know, the AI system would say, "Well, it doesn't look like any rock we've seen before. Therefore, maybe it's a piece of equipment, just like we launched, but being produced by someone else." The question is, "Who produced it?" So, this is a really interesting point because I think the AI approach sort of seems to make sense for like the next 'Oumuamua because if you can classify uh you know, an asteroid as this is not a typical asteroid, and then we can actually send

uh a rover out and and sample it. That's an incredibly exciting prospect. With UAPs and UFOs, the thing that I worry about is if human inference can't figure out what's going on at low sample size. So, right now, you know, we have hundreds of of cases, at least according to the government. Uh and we really have no idea what the hell's going on. This you know, these crafts break conservation of momentum. They are transmedium. They just don't work at all like, you know, normal sort of aircrafts that we know. Work. Uh why

at high sample size would we understand what's going on? And why would a classifier an AI system be able to figure that out? Okay. So, it's not the sample size, it's the quality of the released to the public, it's not convincing scientifically. I cannot write a scientific paper based on eyewitness testimonies. The way that science is done, physics is done, is using instruments that you have full

control over. And if you think about um military-grade equipment, it it is designed to the battlefield. It's not the same quality instrumentation that you would use on a scientific expedition trying to figure out what these objects are. Now, it's possible that the government has high-quality data, but it's classified. The government uses a lot of sensors that are monitoring the sky above the United States. But, you don't want the adversaries to know the quality of the instruments being used.

That's why the Galileo Project aims to get open data and analyze it in a transparent way. The Galileo Project has received funding in order to set up an array of detection devices on top of the Harvard College Observatory. It will be the first multi-sensory system of its kind, combining optical, infrared, radar, audio, and magnetic sensors. Artificial intelligence algorithms will be used to classify the objects as a bird, a drone, or something else. I received thousands of emails from people that are excited to contribute to

the project. By now, we have more than a hundred scientists engaged in the Galileo Project. We are purchasing the instrumentation that we will place on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory in the coming months. The And then, the main update over government then is the constant passive observation. Because Because the government has all those things, right? But, they're Anecdotal. Yes. Every now and then, they would see something, but they didn't really intend to see it. Another thing that is I'm being asked a lot is how come astronomers look at the sky all the

time? How come they don't see these things? Well, the answer is simple. Astronomers are focusing on distant sources that don't move much on the sky. And as a result, if a bird flies above the observatory, they ignore it. You know, 70 years ago, Enrico Fermi went to lunch with his colleagues, and they talked on the question of how likely it is that there are extraterrestrials out there. And he said, "But, where is everybody?" Uh and that to me is very presumptuous. It's just like sitting at home and

saying, "Nobody is knocking on my door. Therefore, I don't have neighbors." Well, Enrico, you should look through your windows with telescopes in order to find your neighbors. You can't just say, "Where is everybody?" Just like like sitting on the beach and saying, "Where is all the fish?" Of course, if you don't use a fishing net, you will not find any. And if you use a fishing net, you better make the fishing net with holes that are sufficiently small smaller than the size of a fish. You have a predecessor at Harvard, a guy named John Mack, who was head of the the

psychiatry department, who looked into kind of alien abduction stuff on a more of an anecdotal, kind of personal level. He interviewed a bunch of abductees. And then, you know, you you you know, Dr. Gary Nolan, of course, at Stanford, as well. All of these guys seem to think that there's some element involved in the person seeing the alien or the craft. And there's, you know, that that breaks our materialist reductionist paradigm. We should live in a Cartesian dualist universe. There

should be objective matter. My mind should be completely separate from that. And yet, they're saying that certain people can see these things and other people can't. What do you think? Well, you cannot use, in particular, people as detectors of reality. I mean, of course, there is a whole field of social science, psychology, you know, trying to understand people. That's perfectly fine if you want if your subject is people. But if your subject is objects flying in the sky, then I won't I won't give a damn about what people testify because I

want to detect those things with But if we find out that a disproportionate amount of fighter pilots who see UFOs have an enlarged caudate nucleus and putamen. So, it's an area that I've talked about before between the head of the caudate and the putamen, and it was larger in all these individuals. That seems worthy of Well, the question is, what is the cause and effect in that case? Because it may well be that because they have these things in their brain, they are But fighter pilots, I mean, they're they need to be objective about reality in

every other sense. Yeah. So, I would say and death. It's not as if I don't believe them or I doubt that they had these experiences. It's just that I want to validate it. And the way to do that is by publishing in mainstream journals scientific data that was collected by instrumentation that we have full control over. It feels like this is ramped up since the the 1940s and maybe even in conjunction with our development of

nuclear weapons. And people who claimed interactions seem to say that, you know, the aliens are trying to tell them that we're destroying ourselves and that there's some sort of hubris involved in in in mankind and we're killing ourselves with with both tech and moral depravity or Well, my concern is that we are going in a direction where virtual realities appeal to people more than the actual reality we all share. Especially like you see that there are now UFOs, at least in the fact that they're unidentified in reality. And you

want to go into the metaverse? Like let's figure this out first. It's way more exciting. That's a good segue into an essay that you wrote that I really enjoyed, which is that VR might be a good answer actually to the Fermi paradox. Do you want to Right. So, as soon as I heard about the metaverse being announced, Yes. I realized that it may be a solution to Enrico Fermi's paradox. If there are lots of advanced technological civilizations that live in their virtual realities, they may close themselves in a cocoon. Yeah. And you might ask, will

we ever know about them? Well, the answer is possibly because they still have to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics. They produce some trash that they deposit into space. Mhm. And just like those reporters that go through the trash cans of celebrities in Hollywood to figure out their private lives, we might find some trash in space and know that they exist. Well, we're creating a lot of trash in space. We're putting up all these satellites for the internet service provider Leo constellation networks. Oh,

it's it's interesting to see how much the launch market has ramped up and how much it will ramp up probably over the next 15, 20, 25 years. That's That's the whole point of doing archaeology in space that you can find all those plastic bottles that were released into the ocean of interstellar space over the billions of years. Do you think that alien civilizations sending probes or envoys or or drones would be more likely than them maybe coming themselves? Definitely. I do think that the equipment is much more likely to be

uh our first encounter rather than living creatures cuz they cannot survive space exposed to cosmic rays. And by the way, that's my one of my criticism about space tourism where people talk about establishing large communities of people on the surface of Mars. It feels like that rests on so many assumptions. Yeah, that's like the the magnetic field of the earth protects us from cosmic radiation. And then you have we need to nuke the poles to terraform Mars. And you need to nuke them, you know, 4,000 times a day.

Drop thermonuclear weapons over the There are a lot of I love Elon. Right. But I think it's no need to because we can be proud of our technological kids. physiologically the same for about 200,000 years. And then all of a sudden in the last 5% of our existence, and you know, 10,000 years ago we got the agricultural revolution. And just about every founding myth talks about people from the stars, you know, teaching us

agriculture. You have all sorts of megalithic architecture that, you know, feels very hard for even people in the modern day with modern engineering uh to build. You have cargo cults in French Polynesia building landing tracks for presumably some alien craft to return that's rooted in their mythology. You have a lot of anecdotal kind of weird evidence uh around that time. You have Sumerian um architecture that shows a precocious knowledge of astronomy. It shows a heliocentric universe, which as you

said, you know, Galileo was put on house arrest and considered a heretic for, you know, thousands of years later. So, I I think all of those things are pretty interesting. And maybe it has something to do with the roots of our We definitely could learn something new about our history by finding our neighbors or welcoming guests. One reason for that is that you can benefit from guests, get get some knowledge about things that go beyond what you experienced. Definitely a good reason for us to welcome interstellar guests

because we can learn about our past. We can learn about places we've never visited. Do you have a sense of the nearest kind of habitable exoplanet? Do you have a best candidate? Is it Kepler-452 or is it uh Proxima Centauri or Well, Proxima Centauri happens to have a planet which is called Proxima b. The point about this planet is it has a permanent day side, a permanent night side. So, one conclusion from that is if there is a civilization on that planet

uh and they are technologically they would put photovoltaic cells on the day side and generate electricity that will illuminate the night side. So, a few months ago I wrote a paper with the an undergraduate student from Stanford uh basically saying that the James Webb Space Telescope could look for city lights on the night side of Proxima b, this planet in the habitable zone around Proxima Centauri. If, you know, we see the dark side being illuminated,

we know that it's artificial. What do you say to the, you know, there are plenty of physicists who talk about the anthropic principle? They say that, you know, something like Planck's constant is just so improbable. And it turns out that everywhere we look, there's a lot of little accidents, seemingly accidents that that have to happen that that allow us to be here. So, what do you think? Well, regarding the constants in physics, we, you know, we don't know where they came from, and whether they have other values elsewhere is something to look for. Again, we should be modest.

That would be an excellent question to ask an extraterrestrial. Perhaps they figured it out. My concern is that if there is a committee out there, uh interstellar committee trying to decide uh whether there are intelligent civilizations around stars in the Milky Way galaxy, they may have concluded so far that we are not intelligent enough. Because uh by the way we treat each other, by the way we behave, not worrying about our environment, and being careless about

various things. But, in fact, the most embarrassing thing was New Horizons, which was sent to explore Pluto. Mhm. And uh NASA decided to put uh 30 g of ashes of the person who discovered Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh, the scientist. Uh and to me, that's very embarrassing cuz if you think about it, what are ashes? Ashes are burnt up DNA. So, we take the genetic information of a person, and we burn it up. it. There is no information content. You

put it in a box on a spacecraft to represent to commemorate the person who discovered Pluto. If another civilization sees that, you know, it would be very embarrassing cuz they would say, "What is this primitive ritual that this culture is going through?" They They destroyed the information about a person that they want to commemorate. My colleague Eric Weinstein recently joined the Galileo project. We sometimes speculate about the physics of UAPs. He's obviously much higher level than me. He thinks they might exhibit geometric unity-like properties. I have

another friend who thinks that maybe they're sort of more macroscopic To me, immediately I realized that's not your average macroscopic interaction. It's actually probably because it's an emergent property of underlying strange quantum mechanics that are going on. Do you have any sense of what the the physics are of UAPs? Well, I I think again we should be modest in the sense of just like this seeing a cell phone, you know, we should not pretend to figure out what it might

represent if we have not really studied Final question for you. Do you think we'll find metamaterials that exhibit properties uh it comes to aerospace capabilities that we just don't presently have? So, things like anti-gravity Well, uh I should say that the universe is accelerating its expansion. So, there is anti-gravity pushing galaxies away from each other. Einstein liked the idea that the universe never expanded because then you

don't have to imagine what was there before the beginning. So, he introduced the negative gravity from the vacuum such that it would balance exactly the effect of matter. But, that was his biggest blunder, his biggest mistake in the sense that we know the universe is expanding. He didn't know it. And after it was realized the universe is expanding, Einstein said, "Okay, it's a Forget about it." Then it turned out the universe is accelerating its

expansion actually recently. So, altogether you have negative gravity. Now, the question is can you harvest that um negative gravity in a technological way? local level, yeah. Yeah, and that is something we don't know, but we definitely know that it's possible to produce antigravity because we see the universe accelerating its expansion. That's a fact. To me, it's obvious, it's a matter of common sense that if the public cares so much about the subject and if the government is puzzled about the subject

that scientists should help, especially given the implications if we end up finding that these objects are extraterrestrial equipment. You know, that would be huge. And there you can use the argument raised by Blaise Pascal who said, "We don't know if God exists, but the implications if God exists, the implications are huge. Therefore we should not dismiss it, that notion, up front." My favorite Blaise Pascal quote might be um the limit of rationality is the end

point of rationality is the end of rationality. Uh but I find I find it very noble that you are a rational man looking at something that seems very irrational. When I was 18, I was drafted to the military and the first training I had was in the paratroopers. At the time, I remember the saying that sometimes a soldier needs to put his body on the barbed wire so that other soldiers will pass And that's pretty much what I feel. I feel that this subject is so important

that I don't care how many wounds I get out of the interaction with some of my conservative colleagues because it's important for humanity in the long run. Yes. Let's not be the adults in the room. Let's be the kids that explore the world and figure it out. Let's do it. I think it's very cool what you're doing, man. And thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. My pleasure.