Are UAP Orbs Meteoritic Dust Clouds?
Today, I received an interesting new preprint (available here) from Professor John Birks with the following accompanying message:
“Dear Prof. Loeb,
I greatly appreciate your recent work on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) and wanted to give you a preprint (attached) of a paper I have submitted to Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics proposing an explanation for UAP orbs and possibly daytime objects, e.g., “flying saucers,” as well.
In this paper, I review hundreds of orb sitings reported on the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) website and find that orb observations are highly correlated with meteor fireball observations reported on the American Meteor Society website (better than 99% confidence). This led me to develop a theory of orbs based on the properties of meteor dust. The theory can explain virtually all the behaviors of orbs. And, importantly, daytime orbs are expected to look like solid objects — like flying saucers for example.
I am a Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder and an atmospheric chemist best known for co-developing what became known as the “nuclear winter” theory with Paul Crutzen in 1982. The theory was further developed and given its name by Carl Sagen and colleagues the following year. Paul went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for his work on the ozone layer. My work has spanned theoretical chemistry, laboratory measurements of reactions responsible for the “ozone hole,” field measurements of air pollutants, and development of new measurement techniques for chemical species in general. As founder of 2B Technologies, I led a team that developed a new generation of air pollution monitoring instruments, so I am also very interested in your project to monitor UAPs as well.
I would be happy to discuss my paper with you at your convenience. I believe it can explain a large fraction of UAP sightings.
All the best,
John
Dr. John Birks
Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, CU Boulder
Fellow Emeritus, Cooperative institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Birks”
Upon receiving the email, I was on a 10-hour flight from Athens, Greece to Boston, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, I read the paper with great interest and shared it with the UAP Science Advisory Council (https://uapsac.com/) under my leadership.
The UAP file release from June 12, 2025 includes a report (accessible here) dated June 5, 2026, signed by Dr. Jon Kosloski, director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in the Pentagon. The report mentions that during two days in October 2023 law enforcement officials noticed anomalous phenomena including an orange “mother” orb launching smaller red orbs with some orbs lasting for several hours, incompatible with the burn time and descendance rate of known military flares. About 40% of the reported phenomena lack a reasonable explanation in terms of human-made technologies and remain unresolved according to AARO.
Could these AARO orbs be dust clouds from meteoritic debris?
This association is suggested by the new preprint. The preprint analyzes 508 orb sightings from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), which involve silent orbs in the form of plasmas emitting visible light of varying colors for durations of up to hours. The preprint finds a significant statistical correlation of UAP orbs with meteor fireballs and explores a possible physical origin for this association.
The new preprint proposes that the orbs represent a previously unrecognized form of ionized dusty plasma formed by stabilization of meteoric dust. In particular, the remnant magnetization of meteoritic iron, nickel, and magnetite, leads to aggregation and confinement of the dust cloud. The heat from the oxidation of metallic iron and nickel provides an energy source and facilitates thermal buoyancy of the clouds in the Earth’s atmosphere, while electrical activity arises from electric charging caused by particle collisions and convective mixing.
The iron-based, dusty plasma model attempts to explain the various reported features of luminous orbs: buoyancy, long lifetimes of minutes to hours, electrical behavior and pronounced color variability. The luminosity is sustained through continuous energy dissipation through electric charging driven by convection induced by iron oxidation. Since electric breakdown has a threshold, modest fluctuations in pressure, humidity, particle concentration, or local electric field strength could lead to intermittent discharge behavior, producing the observed blinking and flickering of orbs. Weakly charged orbs must accumulate additional charge before re-initiating discharge, while more strongly charged orbs can perturb the local electric field sufficiently to induce emission in nearby non-emitting or weakly emitting orbs, consistent with reports of “dark” orbs becoming luminous in the presence of active ones.
A magnetically confined dusty plasma also provides a plausible explanation for orb division and merging. Weak electromagnetic binding among neighboring orbs could lead to merging. The new preprint shows that the required energy can be reasonably satisfied in meter-scale orbs for typical mass, particle size, charge state, and magnetic strength, which could favor splitting into two or more orbs under mechanical stresses from wind shear or turbulence. Orb division resulting in orbs of different colors may result from partial phase separation during splitting, yielding separate orb fragments with differing particle compositions or size distributions.
According to the proposed model, luminous orbs represent a rare but physically real atmospheric phenomenon. At the particle concentrations under consideration, the orbs are opaque even though the particles occupy only a small fraction of the total volume. Consequently, during daylight an orb would likely appear as an opaque object rather than a luminous one, with a white, gray, or silvery appearance depending on illumination, viewing angle, and particle composition.
The apparent shape of an orb would also depend on atmospheric conditions and internal dynamics. While a quiescent orb might appear approximately spherical, internal convection, rotation, deformation by ambient winds, and variations in particle concentration could produce a range of morphologies, including spherical, disc-like, and elongated or cigar-shaped forms, and those forms could evolve over time.
As noted by civilian and military pilots, UAP orbs may constitute an air traffic hazard. Whether they are a natural outcome of meteoritic dust clouds or something else, it is important to figure out their nature in order to mitigate the risk.
Currently, there are about 11,000 active communication satellites around Earth, with an average operational lifespan of 5 years for the ~95% of them that occupy low-Earth orbits. As these satellites eventually burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, their space debris might also generate UAP orbs with properties resembling the meteoritic orbs modeled in this new preprint.
In the coming weeks, the UAP Science Advisory Council will compare this model against quantitative data available on AARO’s orbs to determine whether the model can account for all the observed UAP orb properties. It would be particularly interesting to check if the AARO orbs are fully explained by this model. Of course, there could be some cases of orbs that behave differently and are not explained by this model. The council’s analysis will be effective if it could explain away some of the cases, while focusing attention on those cases which are not explained. UAP are a mixed bag. There is no doubt about that.
It may even be possible to check whether UAP orbs can be generated in the laboratory from magnetic nanoparticles of iron. This theoretical model and its experimental tests will demonstrate how evidence-guided scientific research can make progress in figuring out the nature of UAP.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is chair of the UAP Science Advisory Council to the White House, Pentagon, FBI and intelligence agencies, director of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 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
