[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb is not your typical astronomer. For many years, he’s been scouring the universe for the abnormal and the unknown. “Brushing anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking,” as he puts it, is anathema for him.

In 2021, Loeb founded the Harvard-based Galileo Project to speed up the scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial objects. Since then, Loeb has been supervising the construction of three state-of-the-art observatories in the United States: one in Massachusetts, one in Pennsylvania and one in Nevada. They make use of machine learning models to identify unexplained anomalies and use triangulation to infer the distance of objects from Earth.

“Instead of waiting for the U.S. government to release its data, we just look up and ask, are there any objects up there that are not human-made? And of course, anything that is human-made is boring, as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

Did his observatories find evidence of objects that might be extraterrestrial? Perhaps. They detected objects that, as he said, “arrive in our backyard from outside the solar system.” Such interstellar objects were purely theoretical before 2017, when the first one was discovered. Since then, two more have been found. This, he told me, is the new frontier in astronomy.

But are these interstellar objects of natural origin? Many astronomers believe they are, but Loeb is not so sure. Take, for example, Oumuamua, the first recognized interstellar object ever discovered: Its core features are undisputedly abnormal. Oumuamua moved very quickly without a recognizable method of propulsion. And as it left the solar system, it accelerated to a degree that could not be explained by gravity alone.

Loeb has been arguing that Oumuamua might be an artificial light sail propelled by solar radiation pressure and built by ancient civilizations that exist or existed beyond our solar system.

“Most of the stars formed billions of years before the sun. The sun formed only 4.6 billion years ago … There was plenty of time for Voyager-like probes to arrive in the solar system. And so we are searching for any technological artifacts, objects very different from traditional SETI,” he said.

SETI stands for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” and refers to a project dedicated to detecting advanced extraterrestrial civilizations.

Here are some of the many other topics we discussed in our wide-ranging interview:

-What is the origin of hypervelocity stars that race through the universe at a significant fraction of the speed of light?
-Are there other dimensions beyond our own?
-How would the discovery of extraterrestrial life impact religious views?
-Is AI a form of alien intelligence?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Register NOW for my “Killed to Order” book launch at Trump Kennedy Center with Rob Schneider. 

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Professor Avi Loeb, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Professor Avi Loeb:

Thanks for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

Professor Loeb, is there intelligent life out there?

Professor Loeb:

I very much hope so, because one reason I’m searching for a higher intelligence is that I don’t often find it here on Earth. And frankly, given that there are 100 billion stars like the Sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and we now know that about 10 percent of them have a planet the size of the Earth, roughly at the same separation. Moreover, science argues that life started on Earth from a soup of chemicals.

If you arrange for similar circumstances on a billion Earth-Sun analogs in the Milky Way galaxy, it is very likely that there has been a more accomplished space entrepreneur than Elon Musk since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. All we need to do is check whether there are any objects arriving in our backyard that were launched by a neighbor.

Mr. Jekielek:

Professor Loeb, there are all sorts of types of messaging that are coming out from our government. We have Representative Anna Paulina Luna basically agitating to get disclosures. We’ve had hearings. We’ve had both President Trump and President Obama talk about extraterrestrial life in this cagey way. I believe President Obama even said he believes that it exists. So why this caginess? You make it sound like we don’t really know.

Professor Loeb:

We don’t know, because we don’t have conclusive evidence that has been presented to us. There are two ways of obtaining this evidence. It is either in the hands of the government because the U.S. government has been monitoring the sky and the oceans for many decades. In the process of doing that, the defense budget is huge; it’s close to a trillion dollars for 2026. In the process of collecting a lot of data, they may have noticed unusual phenomena that are quite rare. That is one way for us to get at the truth about the physical reality of our neighborhood.

The second way is, of course, to do the scientific work needed, invest the funds, and put in the research effort to try to find evidence for extraterrestrials. In 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi was having lunch at Los Alamos. He was part of the Manhattan Project and stayed there later. They were discussing extraterrestrials back then. That’s 76 years ago. He commented, they are likely to exist, but where is everybody?

If I were next to him, I would put my arm around his shoulder and say, Enrico, that is a question that every lonely person asks. What you tell a lonely person is, don’t be so presumptuous. You’re not that attractive. Your partner will not come to you. You should be proactive and search for a partner. And Enrico didn’t really build a telescope. He didn’t look for the evidence.

You know, space and time are vast in astronomical terms. We are talking about the size of the Milky Way’s tens of thousands of light-years and the age of the Milky Way is roughly 10 billion years. So you can’t just ask, sitting at lunch, why aren’t they next to me? You have to search for them. And we haven’t done that extensively.

Right now, the astronomy community has decided that its highest priority is to search for microbes. And they’re willing to pay on the order of $10 billion or more in the next two decades in order to build a space observatory that would give us a hint about the chemical fingerprints of microbes on other planets. My point is, when you go on a date, you better aim high, not low. And therefore, I would be much happier, if instead of meeting a microbe as my dating partner, I were to meet a more intelligent being, because then there is a chance of learning from that being and becoming better.

And so I say, let’s invest a similar level of funding in the search for technological civilizations, because we can potentially benefit much more. It will change the future of humanity. And we have the tools for that. And even though microbes might be much more abundant in the universe, it might be easier to identify a technological gadget because you would see that it has buttons on it. It’s not a rock.

And so it will be very clear to us that not only life exists, but intelligent life exists. And, you know, we are all familiar with the Copernican revolution, which indicated that we are not at the center of the universe. And it might well be that we are not at the intellectual center of the universe. There is someone smarter than us, a sibling in our family that is more accomplished. And that would actually bring us to a better place.

Mr. Jekielek:

So you don’t believe that we’ve been visited?

Professor Loeb:

Oh, I don’t know. We may well have been visited. In fact, we don’t know the history of Earth. The documented human history is only 8,000 years old. And the question is, what introduced life here on Earth? Maybe it was an interstellar gardener. We just don’t know that. And as far as we can do, we basically monitor the sky and check if there are any visitors to our backyard. That’s the minimum we can do.

We’ve been searching for 65 years for radio signals, but that’s just like waiting for a phone call. In fact, we do not use radio communication as much as we did a century ago. So I think checking for objects is a new frontier that is enabled by the next generation of sensors that we are starting to employ right now. And this offers us a great opportunity to discover things that we’ve never known about before.

Mr. Jekielek:

And what about President Trump’s recent commitment to offer some disclosure? What do you think the government has been hiding? Obviously, there’s classified information that isn’t available to us. Maybe, I don’t know if some of it is available to you or not. Obviously, you’re not going to tell me that. But why is this being kept under wraps?

Professor Loeb:

That is an interesting question. And the fact that serious people talk about this means that it’s not a hallucination. It’s not something that should be dismissed because apparently the U.S. intelligence agencies, as well as the Pentagon, have evidence for objects that do not behave like human-made technologies. And as far as I can tell, I haven’t seen that evidence. It may represent data from satellites that was never disclosed publicly or materials that were collected at crash sites. But in any event, it implies that it’s an embarrassment to the intelligence agencies because they get paid to figure out what flies in our sky. And if they’re not able to do that, they might prefer to hide it from congressional scrutiny, for example.

Also, if it’s clearly not related to human-made technologies, they might brush it aside and say, well, that’s potentially an interesting scientific matter, what lies beyond the solar system, but that’s not our jurisdiction. We are supposed to focus on national security. The government is not a scientific organization that should figure out what lies beyond the solar system. This is the day job of astrophysicists like myself. And I would love to help the government figure it out if they have evidence of this nature.

So far, the only videos and imagery that were released were relatively low quality, and that is not conclusive. You cannot tell the distance of the objects that you’re seeing. You cannot tell how fast they’re moving, how much they are accelerating, or whether they behave beyond human-made technologies. That’s why I decided to establish, or lead, the Galileo project where we built our own observatory.

So instead of waiting for the U.S. government to release its data, you know, we just look up and ask, are there any objects up there that are not human-made? And of course, anything that is human-made is boring as far as I’m concerned. Of course, it’s the main focus of the Pentagon. But for me, as a scientist interested in what lies beyond the solar system, I really am eager to see if there’s anything else. In these observatories, by now we have three of them, one in Massachusetts, another one in Pennsylvania, and a third one in Nevada.

Even if we don’t find anything, we’re looking at millions of objects every year, analyzing the data with machine learning software and trying to figure out if there are any outliers. Even if we don’t find anything, I would feel that I did something important because I’m happy to provide the the technology of the sensors that we use, the architecture of the observatories, as well as the software that we develop for the Pentagon so that they can use the same to identify objects in the sky for the benefit of national security, so this effort will not be wasted. I believe that this subject belongs to the mainstream of science. Rather than ignore unidentified anomalies, we should focus on these anomalies because discovering something beyond this earth, technologically, would be the biggest discovery ever made in science.

Mr. Jekielek:

So I had an impromptu conversation with a pretty prominent but low-key person. He told me that he had been flying basically these kinds of listening missions in the 1950s for the U.S. Air Force. And that he himself encountered, while doing this, at one point, something that was basically moving around his plane in a way that was impossible by their own calculations. He saw it, right, sort of around his plane. What have you heard, and what do you believe about the credibility of claims that you’ve heard?

Professor Loeb:

Yes, so there were military personnel, including pilots, who testified in Congress, and I truly believe them. But the issue with eyewitness testimonies is that there are testimonies also from the FBI about events that cannot be easily explained away. These are people with integrity that you trust, and clearly, they have seen something unusual, but in contrast to the legal system where eyewitness testimonies can put someone in jail, in science, you cannot rely on what people tell you.

There are prisoners who were put on death row and then were exonerated as a result of DNA testing. And, you know, humans are often misled, and they might tell you a story that is not factually correct. And so we need to verify whether things like that exist by getting scientific-quality data. And perhaps the U.S. government already has that.

I would love to be part of a board that reviews those pieces of evidence, as long as they are quantified and documented, and then to recommend to the U.S. President what to do about it or what to release to the public.  There could be two phases to this analysis: one in which credible people, scientists, look into the data and recommend what it means, also what to do next in terms of analyzing it and collecting more data. And the second is what to release publicly because any such information obviously will cause some unrest in the financial markets and in the public at large. We don’t want to cry wolf too often.

For example, there is a new frontier right now in astronomy, which is the detection of objects that arrive in our backyard from outside the solar system. The first one was announced in 2017, less than a decade ago. And since then, we have found two more with telescopes. There will be many more, dozens more in the coming decade from the Rubin Observatory funded by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation in Chile.

And so the fundamental question is how we can decide whether any of them is technological in origin. And of course, that relies on data. So I suggested a classification scale back in July when 3I/Atlas, the latest interstellar object, was discovered. I said that we should classify those on a scale between zero and 10, where zero is a natural, definitely natural object, an asteroid or a comet. And 10 means alien technology that is a potential threat to humanity. And even if the rank is low, we should consider a black swan event because we are all familiar with September 11th and October 7th.

These are events that the intelligence agencies classified incorrectly, and they ended up having a huge impact on society even though the intelligence agencies thought that they had a low probability of materializing. So I recommend that we basically rank each and every interstellar object and decide whether it’s a potential threat to humanity because we never know if our dating partner is friendly or hostile. It could be a serial killer. And so that would give it a new meaning to defending Earth.

As of now, we have only thought about the rocks—rocks that could be a risk to metropolitan areas. If the rock is bigger than a football field, it could destroy a huge, city-like region on Earth. And so we are trying to identify all the rocks that may impact the Earth. But we haven’t thought about defending Earth against alien technology because we haven’t collected enough evidence, at least beyond government, on such objects. And so we should, of course, be aware of that. But with respect to the data the government already has, I will be delighted to look into that. And I think the decision by President Trump represents an important step forward in that context.

Mr. Jekielek:

So you don’t think there’s a men-in-black agency?

Professor Loeb:

No, I think that probably the government does not know what it means. And they may have, if they have materials, provided the materials to corporations. Because I had a visitor to my home who used to be a senior executive at Lockheed Martin. And he noted that the idea that Lockheed Martin received materials from crash sites that may be extraterrestrial technological material is not necessarily wrong. And then I asked another former employee of Lockheed Martin. He denied any such connection. So it may well be compartmentalized within those corporations. And maybe even some of the information is not delivered to the President of the United States. I just don’t know how far it goes.

And there is, of course, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office [AARO] in the Pentagon. that was tasked to identify and figure out past reports. And they told me when I visited them less than a year ago, they told me that they looked into all the reports and did not find anything credible to indicate extraterrestrial technological origin, except for a few FBI reports.

These are things that, in fact, Representative Anna Paulina Luna is aiming to look into, thanks to the decision by President Trump. And I’m in close contact with Representative Luna. I think she’s doing excellent work. And I very much hope to assist her with my scientific knowledge if she gets access to such information.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, so I’m kind of imagining these kinds of buckets of evidence, right? You said we have, of course, we have radio listening stations. There’s not much going on there. We have, you know, these sort of people seeing these unusual phenomena. In some cases, you know, they really believe they’re real. They’re testifying to it under oath. It’s unclear what that is. It’s unclear if there has been some designation. That might be something that’s disclosed. We have these extrasolar objects, extrasolar system objects that are coming through.

Actually, one that I wanted to ask you about because you’ve commented on is Oumuamua. We'll get to that in just a moment. We have these sort of casual testimonies of people coming in from Lockheed Martin and saying, hey, wait a sec, I know something that no one else knows, and we don’t really know what to make of them. What other buckets of evidence are there that you’re aware of?

Professor Loeb:

I think the most important bucket is the scientific one, where we could potentially figure out whether we have a neighbor without the assistance of the U.S. government, just by looking up. And this path of research was opened up over the past decade with the discovery of interstellar objects. Even before Oumuamua, the first recognized interstellar object, there was actually a meteor that was identified by U.S. government satellites back in 2014, that landed in the Pacific Ocean, creating a fireball that released about one percent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy. It was a half-meter-sized object, and it was moving very fast, so fast that it couldn’t be bound by gravity to the solar system. We inferred that with my student.

So I decided to lead an expedition to the Pacific Ocean to search for the materials of this interstellar meteor. And the U.S. Space Command, after I reached out through the White House to them, provided confirmation that based on the data, indeed, this object came from outside the solar system. It had material strength that was tougher than all the meteors cataloged by NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration].

And so we went there, and there will be a Netflix documentary coming out in 2026, hopefully, showing the expedition that I led. We found some material with compositions different from the solar system’s abundance of elements. But as to whether it’s technological, like Voyager or maybe just a rock, we cannot yet conclusively tell. We would need to bring up bigger pieces. We found only tiny molten droplets from there. So that was an interesting approach.

And in principle, the U.S. government perhaps visited the crash sites and collected materials that indicate something extrasolar, as you say. There is a very simple way of telling. The abundances of isotopes can be checked in a very straightforward manner. That’s what we did with the materials from the Pacific Ocean.

So if the U.S. government has some materials, I can immediately tell them whether these materials came from outside the solar system. And then the question is, what kind of technologies are being represented there? And that will be fascinating. It will change our view of our place in the universe.

Currently, we think about the cosmos as a cold and lonely place. The textbooks, some of which I wrote, refer to the universe as being made of matter and radiation and something that doesn’t really appeal to the human spirit. And on the other hand, if we realize that we have siblings out there, we will get an emotional connection. If they visit our backyard, we should visit their backyard. So we will become much more ambitious.

We might want to defend Earth against any risk coming from alien technology. And so I see that as a transformation that humanity will go through. A visit by a group of theologians that were led by the current president of the Templeton Foundation, Tim Dalrymple. They came to Harvard and asked me, what would be the implication if we find the extraterrestrials to be out there?

And I said, it will not have a huge impact on your religious beliefs. Because when I had two daughters and when the second one was born, it didn’t take away any of the love that I have for the first one. And so imagining God as an entity that can attend only to one child is very limiting. And they were very happy with this answer.

Mr. Jekielek:

Do we know now more than we did even, I’m thinking about the 1950s, which is when these topics seem to have started coming up. There’s even these Roswell sites and so forth, crash sites. You’re kind of telling me there’s really no evidence from those places, right?

Professor Loeb:

No, it may well be that the evidence is within government. And one thing to keep in mind, whatever technologies were used by humans in 1950 are not being used anymore. They are completely irrelevant today. And so there is nothing, I mean, there is no reason to hide evidence, material, or imagery from the Roswell case out of national security concerns.If there is anything unusual from 50 years ago, let’s look into it because it cannot risk national security today.

I also say that if we do identify things that behave in strange ways, it makes no sense to hide the evidence because it would be similar to finding a tennis ball in your backyard and then going to have dinner with your family members while hiding this information from them. That makes little sense because if the tennis ball was thrown by a neighbor, that neighbor may show up at the front door or affect the lives of your family members in many different ways. I think we should all be aware of our cosmic neighborhood.

When the Vatican tried to hide the information from the public about what Galileo Galilei found with his telescope, they could hide it for a while. But eventually, in 1992, they had to come out and say that Galileo was right and that the Earth moves around the sun. It was meaningless for them to continue arguing otherwise because we reached the moon two decades earlier. So, it was not good for public relations.

My point is, in the long term, you want to reveal information about our cosmic neighborhood to all humans because we are all in the same boat. In fact, in my view, it would bring a sense of cooperation because if we realize that we have a neighbor, suppose your neighbor comes and knocks on the door, then obviously it makes little sense to have a loud argument within the family. Often, things quiet down when someone knocks on the door at home. That may actually calm down some of the conflicts we have in geopolitics if we all realize that there is someone else out there.

Mr. Jekielek:

One thing that just occurred to me is the concept of extra-dimensional life, right? Is this something that you’ve looked into?

Professor Loeb:

Yes, this is actually a very popular theme within the context of theoretical physics over the past 50 years because one of the big puzzles in physics is how to unify two pillars. One is quantum mechanics, which is the foundation for all the electronic gadgets that we’re using, and the computers and the AI and everything. The second is general relativity, which is Einstein’s theory of gravity that explains gravity as the curvature of space and time. We just don’t have a theory that puts together quantum mechanics with gravity.

You might say, well, where is it needed? Why do we need them to be parts of a unified theory? The answer is, well, when space and time are being curved very much, then quantum effects start playing a role. That was true at the Big Bang when the universe started. The density of matter and radiation was huge. They diverged because the universe is expanding.

So just go back in time. There was a time when everything was extremely dense. And as a result, one needs quantum mechanics to describe how gravity behaves at those early times. The same is true at the center of a black hole, which is basically a point that collects matter and has extreme gravity near it. And these singularities at the center of a black hole or the Big Bang cannot be attended to without a unification of quantum mechanics and gravity.

If we were to figure out how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, we might realize new propulsion methods. And, you know, there are various ideas along these lines. We might not need rockets. We might, for example, distort space and time in ways that allow us to propel a spacecraft much more effectively with very little fuel.

And so it’s possible that other technological civilizations could have mastered that because they have a theory of quantum gravity. They know how; they have quantum gravity engineers. Whether we have extra dimensions or not, we don’t know, but string theory, which is the leading theory for unifying quantum mechanics and gravity, postulates the existence of extra dimensions. And also, you could imagine some other means of curving space and time that do not even refer to the extra dimensions that relate to quantum gravity.

So altogether, I would say our scientific knowledge is limited. And we don’t know what most of the matter in the universe is. We call it dark matter. We don’t know what happened in the Big Bang because we don’t have a quantum gravity theory. And so we are pretty ignorant. Despite a hundred years of modern science and technology, we still don’t know some fundamentals.

And of course, another civilization may have discovered the solution to these puzzles, and we could figure it out once we realize that they are here. We could learn from them. You might ask, how would we detect them? Maybe they avoid our sensors because they operate in a completely different plane of technology. But the way I approach it is just like approaching a blind date. You should not have a prejudice. You should be completely agnostic and observe the other side and look for something unusual, something that is not similar to the natural terrestrial objects that we’ve seen before.

Mr. Jekielek:

When I talk about the idea of this, you know, extra-dimensional life, right, for someone who isn’t familiar with the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, how do you conceive of that, even?

Professor Loeb:

Just think about living on the surface of a balloon, okay? And that is two-dimensional. You might not be aware that there is a third dimension because you are just living on the surface of that balloon. So if there is another being that is capable of taking advantage of the third dimension, then that being will cross the distance between two points on the surface of the balloon faster than you can imagine, because the travel between the two points can go through the third dimension that connects the two points, not necessarily on the curved surface of the balloon.

So there are, in principle, possibilities of navigating in more than the dimensions that we are familiar with. We are familiar with three spatial dimensions plus time. If there are more than three, and there is a technological way of taking advantage of those, we might not realize that objects will appear and disappear in ways that we cannot understand.

In the three dimensions that we are familiar with, Einstein’s theory of relativity states that no material object can move faster than light. However, if there are extra dimensions, you might actually travel faster than light in the three dimensions, even though you’re traveling less than the speed of light in the extra dimensions. So there are lots of possibilities.

By the way, the way I think about physics is a way of setting constraints on our imagination because our imagination can think of lots of possibilities. In order to figure out which one is correct, we need to collect data. You might say, oh, that’s the scientific method.  But many of my colleagues in academia are very conservative. They are not willing to consider new physics easily. So they brush anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking.

One way for us to learn more is, of course, to pay attention to the anomalies because they may lead us to something that we’ve never thought about. You know, there is this, I mean, most of the funding in science is allocated to known unknowns. These are things that we know we don’t know. But there are, based on what Rumsfeld said, unknown unknowns, which are even more important because these are things that we don’t even recognize that we don’t know. The only way to find them is, you know, not to follow the beaten path and explore anomalies, things that we don’t fully understand. Maybe they will open up our eyes to extra dimensions, as you say, or new physics.

Mr. Jekielek:

This is absolutely fascinating, this part of the discussion, because there’s a particular way of thinking, right? For some people and scientists, I know some years back, I myself dabbled for about 10 years in the biological sciences field. Some people will basically say if something is an outlier, they actually remove that from the data set, right? And they say, no, this is reality. But then there are other people, who are more like myself, who are particularly interested in those outliers and why they’re that way. And I guess you kind of need both types of scientists. But I guess most of them tend to be the kind that remove the outliers and say, you know, that doesn’t exist. That’s just maybe even not real, whereas it could be a profound import, right?

Professor Loeb:

Yes, so that suppresses innovation in science, and I’m very much against that. I’m in favor of openly discussing anomalies because it’s our path to new discoveries. And, you know, it’s the approach of a kid that is facing the world. As kids, as children, we approached the learning experience with an open mind because we didn’t really know what the world was. The problem is that as people become adults, they pretend to be the adult in the room to guess in advance what something is and to brush away all anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking because they sort of associate their status with knowing in advance what will happen. And that’s true of experts.

What I say is the foundation of science is the humility to learn. It’s not the arrogance of expertise. Because just to give you an example, experts that were trained on data sets that included only asteroids and comets would argue that any object in the sky must be a rock or an iceberg. And I tell them, look, you should expand your training data set. Just like with AI systems, they get better if you give them more data.

And we know that we have space objects that we launched that are technological in origin. And if you were to include them, you might imagine something else, not just rocks in the sky. And they refuse to do that. And, you know, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you argue everything in the sky is rocks, everything in the sky will be rocks in your eyes.

For example, on January 2nd, 2025, just a year ago, there was a near-Earth object identified by the Minor Planet Center [MPC], and they said it was a near-Earth asteroid. A day later, they realized that it followed the path of the Tesla roadster car that was launched in 2018 by SpaceX. And then they said, sorry, we take it out of the asteroid catalog because it’s a car, it’s not a rock. And the only reason they knew that is because we launched this, I mean, humanity launched this car. If there were an interstellar car, they would definitely insist that it was a rock of a type that they'd never seen before.

By the way, this is exactly the response of a cave dweller to finding a cell phone. Suppose you presented the cell phone to a cave dweller who is used to dealing with rocks. And that cave dweller would say, this is a rock of a type that they’ve never seen before. No, and this is, you know, this is I think this is a bit of Elon Musk’s sense of humor with this floating through space.

Mr. Jekielek:

But no, listen, this is actually a good opportunity to talk a little bit about your background, okay? Because this isn’t all you think about. In fact, one of the things I find incredibly fascinating is these hypervelocity stars that you’ve been studying. But just maybe tell me a little bit about hypervelocity stars, because that’s not something most of us have ever heard of, okay, and don’t even kind of conceive, right, because our stars are supposed to be stationary, right, kind of in our minds, just like our sun. But also, just tell me a little bit about your background, because this, as much as you are very into this issue, you have a much broader area of expertise.

Professor Loeb:

Yes, so hypervelocity stars are stars that are escaping the Milky Way galaxy as if they arrive close to the central black hole. There is a big black hole four million times the mass of the Sun at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. And if a pair of stars comes close to that black hole, it will be torn apart. One of the stars will get more tightly bound to the black hole and the second star will be ejected at a high speed. And it could happen in the center of our galaxy or any other galaxy that has a black hole at its center.

I wrote several papers suggesting that stars can be kicked at a speed that goes all the way up to the speed of light. And in fact, when two galaxies like the Milky Way and its nearest neighbor, the sister galaxy called Andromeda, collide in a few billion years, the two black holes at the centers of those galaxies will come together and spiral in. And as they get to a tight orbit, they can eject stars close to the speed of light.

And I showed that there is a sea, an ocean of stars moving close to the speed of light through the universe, I would have loved to be inhabiting or living on the surface of a planet that is orbiting such a star because the journey, I mean, you start from the galaxy where that star was born in, and then you fly through the entire universe close to the speed of light. That’s an amazing journey. And, you know, travel agencies could make a fortune by selling tickets to such journeys.

But then a little bit about my background. I was born on a farm. And that’s why I always think down to earth, so to speak. I used to collect eggs every afternoon. I would every weekend drive a tractor to the hills of the village and read philosophy books. I was very interested in philosophy. And then I was recruited. I was born in Israel, and military service is obligatory, but I had the fortune of being selected for a program that allowed me to finish my PhD at age 24.

During that time, President Reagan came up with a strategic defense initiative, Star Wars. And General Abrahamson, who was in charge of it, came to visit Israel. I presented the project to him, and this project was selected as the first international project. We received funding from Washington. I visited D.C. quite often. We got a few million dollars a year at the time for that project, and that’s what brought me to visit the US.

Then, in one of my visits, I went to Princeton, where they offered me a five-year fellowship under the condition that I would switch to astrophysics.  So I ended up eventually with a tenured appointment at Harvard. Three years after I arrived at Harvard, they offered me tenure. And then I realized that it was an arranged marriage. But actually I’m married to my true love because I can ask fundamental questions about the universe, such as, are we alone, and what was there at the beginning? And then I can answer them using the scientific method. But that makes me very different from my colleagues.

I’m interested in the big questions, and I’m not divorcing my interests from the public. I feel that I’m a member of the public. I would go back to the farm anytime as plan B. I love nature. I jog every morning at sunrise in the company of birds, ducks, wild turkeys, and bunnies. So altogether, I feel a connection to nature more than to people. I didn’t have any social media footprint until a month ago when AI was used to generate fake videos of me speaking with my voice and my image. At that point, I decided to create my own content on social media. So now I have it.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, you know,  you were saying some crazy things in those AI videos.

Professor Loeb:

Yes, and I think it’s a real problem for the future because we will be flooded with misinformation. And the question is how to judge. And, of course, the solution is to go to primary sources. And that’s why I’m creating my own content so people can go to my channels. I decided to do that after an 82-year-old woman named Abby Rockefeller came to my office. This was a month ago, and she said, I’m the daughter of David Rockefeller, and I saw one of your recent videos, and I loved it. I was so excited that I alerted all my friends to it. And then one of my friends told me that it’s fake.

And so at that moment I said, OK, well, you know, I frustrated them, or not me, but the AI-generated fake videos frustrated an 82-year-old woman. I must do something about it. And I created my content. By now, I already have more than half-a-million views on my YouTube channel after a month.

Mr. Jekielek:

Tell me about, you know, you’ve already talked about the Galileo Project, but you didn’t talk about it by name, okay, yet. So tell me about what the Galileo Project is and how it is related to SETI [the search for extraterrestrial intelligence]. You know, there are a number of these projects that are functioning, and people might be wondering, you know, where they are in their process.

Professor Loeb:

Right. So the SETI approach is to search for radio signals, primarily radio signals. They expanded it to search for laser signals or other electromagnetic signatures from distant planets, planets around other stars, and then, you know, tens of thousands of light-years away. And that was pioneered back in 1960, you know, so it has a long history.

But that is just like waiting for a phone call. Nobody may call you from your street, especially when you’re listening. And those signals propagate at the speed of light. If you miss them, they are gone. However, a better approach is to check for any packages in your mailbox because those stay there. You know, any objects, probes like Voyager, for example, that were launched by another technological civilization would still stay bound to the Milky Way galaxy. I calculated that it takes Voyager less than a billion years to cross the entire Milky Way Galaxy.

So that means that with the technologies of the 1970s, we can cross the entire Milky Way Galaxy on a timescale that is much shorter than the difference between the ages of stars. You know, most of the stars formed billions of years before the sun; the sun formed only 4.6 billion years ago, in the last one-third of cosmic history. And so most of the stars are older than the sun by billions of years. There was plenty of time for Voyager-like probes to arrive in the solar system.

And so we are searching for any technological artifacts, objects very different from traditional SETI. The reason I decided to lead this project four years ago was the reports from the Director of National Intelligence to the U.S. Congress that there are objects in the sky they cannot figure out. And I said, well, let’s try and help them. I am happy to provide all the information we get, of course, to the Pentagon and to the intelligence agencies in case it’s human-made and that could benefit them.

But we are trying to see if there is anything else out there. And so we built three observatories, the latest one in Las Vegas, on top of a sphere. We put an observatory there, and there was actually a promo for the movie Marty Supreme, where Timothée Chalamet was standing on top of the sphere because he’s playing a ping pong player in that movie. They lit up the entire sphere, which is a hundred-meter radius structure, like a ping pong ball he was standing on top of, but if you look closely at the image, you would see our observatory next to him.

We just constructed it last summer. I went up there; it was really thrilling. And so that observatory by now is giving us data that is not just infrared images of the sky, but we are also able to do triangulation. So we can look at the same object from different directions, from different units that are separated by 10 kilometers or so, and figure out the distance and determine the velocity and acceleration of objects. And that will allow us to find unidentified anomalous phenomena.

Because if we find that the performance of an object is well beyond the envelope of technologically human-made objects, then we know that we are looking at something unusual. And, you know, that is information that we could, in principle, write about in a scientific paper, and it will obviously be a huge discovery.

I was asked whether, you know, if we discover something like that, then I would be waiting for the Nobel Prize to get it, and I said no, that would be completely secondary because why would I waste my time at a cocktail party in Sweden when I can learn more about any visitors we have in our backyard? That’s far more exciting. So I will play the Bob Dylan card on this one. I will just ignore any prizes if we do find something.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, do you have candidates? And I guess I should ask, right, do you have anything you’ve looked at that you’ve been told, hey, you’re not allowed to disclose that publicly?

Professor Loeb:

So the answer to the first question is that we haven’t found anything unusual as of yet, but I told my postdocs, and I have five new postdocs this academic year. I told them, if you find anything, call me in the middle of the night. So they have that assurance. With respect to sharing information, I’m happy to collaborate and partner with the Pentagon and any other government entity and provide them with access to the data, as well as access to the computer software that we develop, because as a citizen, I would like them to benefit from what we are doing.

And what we are interested in is complementary to what the government is interested in. While they are focused on human-made technologies, we are focused on anything that is non-human. And so there is no overlap and no competition and no problem with me sharing everything we have with them, so I’m very much in favor of partnership, if they want to establish it. And we are, for the first time this year, starting to get useful data.

Until now, we had to build those observatories; there was a lot of time dedicated to planning the architecture of these observatories, but now we have them, and we are starting to get data. So that’s a great time. And I should say also that we were funded by foundations that support basic research and by individuals who are curious about the questions that we address.

Mr. Jekielek:

Wait, and but, so no one’s ever come to you and said something that you’ve found you’re not allowed to share?

Professor Loeb:

No, because so far we haven’t yet really reached the point where we can figure out distances. You see, that is the key. Okay, so that was true of last week. In particular, I have contacts at AARO in the Pentagon that I’m in conversation with, and I’m not interested in what they’re interested in.

Mr. Jekielek:

Why do you think you’ve become controversial?

Professor Loeb:

In academia, I can tell you why very clearly. So the first paper where I talked about Oumuamua, that was the first recognized interstellar object. It was anomalous because its brightness changed by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling every eight hours. And that implied an extreme shape that is most likely flat. Everyone agreed to that.

Moreover, the object exhibited an excess push away from the sun, some non-gravitational acceleration, without shedding any gas or dust. With our space telescopes, we didn’t detect any gas or dust around it. So there was no rocket effect, as you find in comets. So the question was, what is pushing it?

And I suggested it’s just sunlight, so the object must be thin. And when the paper was submitted for publication at the most prestigious astrophysical journal, it was accepted for publication within three days. The reviewer said, that’s a great idea. But as soon as the media got attention to it, you know, and I had a huge number of reporters at my door a few days later, as soon as the attention from the public came in, I started getting scrutinized and attacked personally within academia. And so to me, it’s an illustration of a very simple fact: the strongest force in academia is jealousy. And, you know, so that is one aspect of it.

A lot of people in academia, like, for example, comet experts, would oppose this idea very much because it contradicts their training data set. They’re used to having rocks in the sky. So anything different from rocks would make them upset, and they would try to kill it because they don’t want to revise their world model.

So they would attack me personally and say, you know, you went to the Pacific Ocean. This was not really an interstellar object. We don’t believe the U.S. government. That’s what they said. We don’t believe the US government. And then you went to the wrong place and all kinds of arguments, you know, that resemble saying something bad about my sister when I don’t have a sister, just to clarify. In any event, that was the second wave of response, and then there are lots of zealots. These are science popularizers that are not real scientists, you know, and that includes a number of well-known figures. If you check on the last paper publication that Neil deGrasse Tyson had or Brian Cox in the UK had, you know, it was more than a decade ago, maybe 15 years, 20 years ago. They are not practicing scientists.

Now, many of these people with less credentials are claiming that they defend science by attacking people who are deviating from the beaten path. And how dare they? It’s just like having commentators look at the soccer match and criticize the soccer players because they know better. The difference between the commentators and the soccer players on the field is that the commentators cannot score a goal. They have no way of scoring a goal. They can just talk about scoring a goal. But the people in the field can do it. And I’m one of those people.

I’m a practitioner of science. Every week I write a new scientific paper. I’m just describing what I’m doing, and they are attacking me instead of arguing scientifically about the merit of my ideas. And so they claim that they defend science, but these people are displaying an anti-science sentiment because they are not attending to anomalies. They are attacking practicing scientists, claiming that they are scientists.

There is even one who calls himself a professor, even though he never had an academic title like that in his life. He was not good enough to stay in academia, and he’s attacking me. I have been a tenured professor at Harvard, you know, since 1996. And he’s attacking me while calling himself a professor as if he’s attending to the truth. You know, that is clearly ridiculous.

Many of these are mediocre scientists. And the sign of their mediocre stature is that they are making statements that are anti-science, that they’re not attending to anomalies; they just want to echo what appears to be popular right now. Now, if the mainstream view changes, they will immediately shift. They would say, of course, we always thought that unidentified objects may be extraterrestrial. We always—I’m willing to bet—because they are seeking popularity. So whatever the popular view is, wherever the wind blows, they will follow.

And what I’m doing is the work of science, which is admitting when there are anomalies and trying to get more data. This is hard work. You know, going to the Pacific Ocean was hard work. All these critics have an easy job. They can just say whatever they want.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, we’ve, on this program, looked into and found this phenomenon to be common in other areas of science as well, the rough phenomenon that you’re describing. Just to be clear, OK, because I want to understand, the thing that made Oumuamua unusual and caused this kind of reaction from people is that its shape was just something that people weren’t ready to understand. And its composition was something that was not commonly believed to be able to exist? Is that right?

Professor Loeb:

The second aspect was the non-gravitational acceleration. There was a force pushing it away from the sun without any evidence for a rocket effect, no evaporation of gas or dust from it. And I said, it’s just the sunlight pushing it. And three years later, the same observatory in Hawaii that discovered Oumuamua discovered another object that was pushed away from the sun by reflecting sunlight. It was given the name 2020 SO, discovered in August 2020.

And then the scientists that discovered it took a spectrum of it. They realized that it was made of stainless steel. And then they figured, oh, this one is actually a rocket booster, an upper stage of a lunar lander mission that NASA launched in 1966. So it’s definitely technological because we launched it. And I asked myself, OK, here we have an object that behaved like Oumuamua. We know that this object was produced by humans, but who made the Oumuamua?

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, well, I would love to learn more. Are you still working on that, or is that chapter closed?

Professor Loeb:

Unfortunately, by now this object is so faint that we can’t detect it, and it makes no sense to chase it for the same reason that when you go to a bar and you see an interesting person, by the time you leave your chair and go to that person, you realize the person left the room. You know, you realize that it will take a huge amount of effort to chase that person, but there are plenty of people in the bar, and you might find someone else interesting. And so my strategy is to plan ahead for future interstellar objects, some of which might be as anomalous as Oumuamua was or even more. And we missed a lot of them in the past.

And so I think that we should, first of all, search for them. There is the Rubin Observatory that monitors the southern sky. There is the Argus Array that will monitor in the future the Northern sky. We should have a system of interceptors that can cross the path of incoming objects of interest. And then we can take a close-up photograph or even bring a sample of material or press a button on one of these objects. All of this should be planned ahead of time.

That’s my hope for the future: now that we know that such mysterious objects arrive in our backyard, we will allocate the resources to approach them and take a close-up photograph just before they get close to us. And, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words. People ask me, how would you know that it’s technological? Very easily. If we take buttons on it, then we know it’s not a rock. The only question that remains is whether we should press a button. Well, I don’t know if I'd be pressing that button.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, we’re going to have to wrap pretty soon. One of the things in the last few years that has become very big is these language learning models, right? Can AI be used to infer things from datasets that already exist that we haven’t basically been able to figure out before? Is this something you’re looking into?

Professor Loeb:

Definitely. I do think that it’s one way of getting through the vast amount of data that has been collected within the U.S. government as well. But astronomers are collecting huge amounts of data right now. One way to identify outliers is with the help of AI agents. I can tell you that two weeks ago, I asked my postdoc to look into a dataset from NASA, and it took an AI agent 10 minutes to figure out the answer, whereas when I gave the same task to an undergraduate student six years ago, it took a week. We can already use AI agents more effectively than students, and that will accelerate the progress of science.

Now, you might view AI systems as alien intelligence because they are made of computer chips, you know, silicon chips, and not from flesh and blood. So when we think of them as being similar to us, it’s just like putting lipstick on a pig; it won’t make the pig beautiful like a human, you know. You might say, okay, well, AI is a form of alien intelligence.

But my point is simple: we can learn much more from a truly alien intelligence because all the AI systems that we develop were trained on experiences here on Earth, either human experiences, human content, or other things that happen on the internet. But it’s all limited to the vantage point of Earth. However, alien intelligence might have benefited from experiences well beyond Earth.

In interstellar space. And that’s a much larger data set because there is much more real estate in outer space than you find here on Earth. That’s why I don’t understand, for example, how Putin thinks, because he is engaged in a war on a small piece of territory. Whereas, if he were just to look up, he would figure out that there is so much real estate beyond Earth. It makes no sense to fight over territory on this small rock. And so I would much rather encounter truly alien intelligence, and I think we will learn much more from that encounter than from our AI systems here on Earth.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, I do have to ask this other question. I mean, the common argument that I’ve heard is that, you know, when civilizations, human civilizations, encountered much more advanced technological civilizations, it never went well for the one that was lower in technology. So maybe I don’t think everyone is as excited and hopeful as you are. Maybe as we really finish up, if you could comment on that, please.

Professor Loeb:

Yes. So I’m an optimist. And the reason I’m an optimist is that sometimes life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And therefore, I’m hoping that the encounter will be friendly, but we should obviously also prepare for the worst, like any other blind date. And I completely understand people who are worried about the potential threat from predators. Unfortunately, we’ve been broadcasting radio signals for a century now. So it’s not as if we were shy. We were careless. And therefore, it’s a bit too late for us now to be worried because we behaved in a very irresponsible way until now.

Mr. Jekielek:

Flirtatious, a flirtatious way, to keep your analogy going, right?

Professor Loeb:

Exactly. But one thing to keep in mind is whoever arrives at our backyard must be far more accomplished technologically than we are because they managed to get to us before we managed to get to them. And that’s a filter that will bring only the best, I think, the most advanced technologically first to us. Because if you think about it, you know, we launched Voyager, but in the future, we'll have much better propulsion systems. And so when Voyager leaves the solar system, there will be faster spacecraft catching up with it and getting farther than it. And there will be many more of them.

So I think the best is yet to come as far as our technologies. But it’s probably also true of alien technologies that the most likely encounter would be with a civilization that is more advanced than we are. So it will be our responsibility to learn from them. We are sort of like ants in the cracks of a pavement watching a biker that passes by. I don’t think they will care too much about us if they are far more advanced. And it’s our responsibility to learn from them and be better.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Professor Avi Loeb, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Professor Loeb:

Thanks for having me.

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.