Are Both Lue Elizondo and AARO Sincere in Their Reports About UAPs?
NewsNation and the New York Post reported today that Lue Elizondo, a former intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, alleges that “The United States has been involved in the recovery of objects, vehicles of unknown origin that are neither from our country or any other foreign country that we’re aware of.” He claims that one of the two spacecraft in possession of the Department of Defense is from the crash site of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.
In his interview with NewsNation, Elizondo stated: “We as a nation have been interested in not only the vehicles themselves but the occupants of these vehicles; to include biological specimens… We’re not alone… The U.S. government has been aware of that fact for decades.” Elizondo added that “The American people have a right to know about the presence of UAPs in our skies.” Elizondo reiterated these themes in a new podcast with Joe Rogan, also released today, on the occasion of the publication of his new book, titled “Imminent”.
The puzzling appearance of unfamiliar objects in the sky was admitted publicly by U.S. government officials. Reports on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) by the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, led in 2022 to the establishment of a new office in the Department of Defense, called the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). The official statement from AARO is: “To date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.” The key word in this statement is `extraterrestrial’.
There is a world in which both Elizondo and AARO are sincere in their reports. In that world, the UAPs are unfamiliar to National Intelligence agencies in the U.S. but they are human-made. The retrieval and reverse engineering programs that Elizondo and David Grusch testified about do exist. These programs study crash sites of vehicles produced by adversarial nations. In that case, the medical damage caused in encounters with UAPs might be related to human-made technologies akin to the Havana Syndrome, and any biological entities recovered in crash sites were terrestrial. The concentration of UAPs near nuclear or military assets is a natural byproduct of espionage. Some of the advanced technologies displayed by UAPs are unknown to U.S. corporations and labeled as anomalous just to hide the confusion about their terrestrial origin. In that world, the apparent vulnerability of the U.S. to national security threats explains why the Department of Defense would suppress disclosure of related details. Any public admission about the unknown terrestrial origin of UAPs would serve the military interests of adversarial nations who produced them.
The fundamental question is whether we live in that world where both Lue Elizondo and AARO are sincere. Yes, there are UAPs in the sky and there are programs for recovery and reverse engineering of debris from crash sites. But while admitting their existence, the Department of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence prefer not to disclose the classified information about the unknown terrestrial origin of some of these remarkable objects. They would rather keep the public confused. Even AARO admitted that they do not have sufficient data to clarify the nature of a few percent of all UAPs.
To find out whether we live in a world in which both Elizondo and AARO are sincere, scientists need to collect their own high-quality scientific data. Neither the sky nor our oceans are classified. The Galileo Project is currently operating a new observatory at Harvard University and constructing two other observatories to watch the entire sky continuously for any UAPs. So far, we identified a million objects in the sky and are currently analyzing them. A year ago, I led a Galileo Project expedition to the Pacific Ocean which retrieved anomalous materials from the crash site of the interstellar meteor, IM1, identified by the U.S. Space Command as originating from outside the Solar System. We are planning a second expedition in a year to find large pieces from this anomalous interstellar object, which was moving faster than 95% of the stars near the Sun and was made of a material tougher than iron meteorites from the Solar System. In 2025, the Rubin Observatory in Chile will start surveying the Southern Sky with a 3.2 gigapixel camera. The Galileo Project research team is currently developing the software that could discover new UAPs and interstellar objects in the unprecedented data stream over the next decade.
Scientific quality data is the key for clarifying whether UAPs are extraterrestrial.
Shortly after today’s news reports, I was asked in a TV interview on NewsNation: “Is Elizondo a credible whistleblower?” I hope to know in the coming years. As a scientist I can only respond to direct evidence of scientific quality, which I hope to collect with the Galileo Project.
The other question was: “Can humanity handle the truth?” I regard this question as irrelevant, since it is always beneficial to know the truth about our cosmic neighborhood. Humanity went through similar learning experiences before. When Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei showed scientific evidence that we are not at the center of the Universe, the Church responded by listing Copernicus’ book De Revolutionibus as a forbidden book until the 19th century and placing Galileo in house arrest. This delay tactics to protect the public from scientific evidence did not work out. In 1992, the Vatican admitted that Galileo was right. This was 23 years after humans landed on the Moon.
Earlier this year, I gave a public lecture in Torun, Poland, the birth town of Nicolaus Copernicus. The title of my lecture was: “The Next Copernican Revolution.” A day before this event, I attended the Munich Security Conference through a Q&A forum about the search for extraterrestrial technological civilizations, led by the brilliant Rolf Dobelli, founder of WORLD.MINDS. The back-to-back schedule of these two events signifies the two facets of UAPs represented by Elizondo and AARO. I am doing my best to resolve the tension between them with the best tools of science at my disposal.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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. His new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2023.
