On Mysterious Orbs and Fireballs
The UAP Science Advisory Council for the U.S. Government, under my leadership, inaugurated today its public website here. We aim to figure out scientifically the nature of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), reported by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office in the Pentagon, the White House, the FBI and the intelligence community.
In order for an object to be detectable by cameras, it must interact with light. This implies that it also interacts electromagnetically with air, because atoms and molecules are composed of electrically charged particles. If the object moves much faster than the speed of sound (330 meters per second at sea level) through air, it drives a shock wave. This inevitably generates a bright fireball of hot plasma, bounded by a loud pressure wave. The inevitable production of a fireball and a sonic boom do not depend on the propulsion mechanism of the object. It is an unavoidable consequence of the fact that the object appears to be moving fast in camera images.
This inference also holds when dealing with an extreme spacetime structure, such as a warp drive or any other spacetime bubble with strong gravity, often hypothesized to explain Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) in the Earth’s atmosphere. The spacetime distortion hypothesis was mentioned by Hal Puthoff in a science panel of the UAP Disclosure forum that I attended with him in the U.S. Senate on June 25, 2026 (accessible here) as well as in a subsequent podcast that we shared the same day with Rep. Eric Burlison (accessible here).
In a warp bubble moving at a speed comparable to the speed of light, the distortion of spacetime is of order unity. When such a spacetime structure moves through air, it would trigger motion of air molecules passing through it at roughly the speed of light during a period of order the light crossing time of the bubble. The inevitable collisions of air molecules with each other will heat up the air around the bubble to an extremely high temperature, triggering the formation of a fireball as powerful as those seen around large meteors or atomic explosions. The heat deposited would eventually be radiated away. For a bubble that moves at the speed of light, the dissipated power could peak at a value of order the rest mass energy of the air within the bubble volume divided by the light crossing time of the bubble. For a UAP of order 10 meters in size, this corresponds to a power larger than the luminosity of the Sun, yielding a total energy output of 50 megatons of TNT — comparable to the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated — the Soviet Union’s Tsar Bomba, every light-crossing time of 30 nanoseconds.
In his official reports and public statements regarding the 2004 USS Nimitz encounter, retired Navy Commander David Fravor consistently described UAP as being 12 meters long and flying faster than 5 times the speed of sound. Based on known physics, such a motion would inevitably shock the surrounding air to a temperature hotter than 1,600 degrees Kelvin and release a luminosity larger than 50 megawatts. The associated pressure wave would have been well above a sonic boom audible by witnesses. People in the Nimitz strike group, within a distance of a few kilometers, would have experienced a physically violent pressure wave. No such boom was reported by any of the witnesses.
A recent report (accessible here) dated June 5, 2026, signed by Dr. Jon Kosloski, the director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in the Pentagon, mentions that during two days in October 2023 law enforcement officials noticed UAP including an orange “mother orb” launching smaller red orbs, with 40% of the reported phenomena being unresolved as they lack a reasonable explanation in terms of human-made technologies. The orbs were reported as silent. In at least one case, a red orb was reported to be stationary for several hours, incompatible with the burn time and descent rate of any known military flares.
These UAP mysteries call for a rigorous scientific study, which is precisely the goal of the newly established UAP Science Advisory Council under my leadership (as described here). The path forward in interpreting such reports is to obtain multi-sensor data that would clarify the nature of UAP and test whether they are indeed associated with motion of real objects.
Spectroscopy can quantify the emission temperature and radar can pin down the distance of UAP. New sensor assemblies may follow the approach taken by the observatories of the Galileo Project under my leadership at Harvard University. In particular, the Galileo Observatory in Las Vegas includes three units separated by 10 kilometers from each other, which triangulate objects and measure their distance, velocity and acceleration to better than 10% (as discussed here).
Based on the history of science, new physics does not usually violate the principles of known physics in the regime where traditional physics applied. Current scientific research projects focus on known unknowns, such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy. But the biggest breakthroughs awaiting discovery may involve unknown unknowns, namely things that we do not even know that we do not know. To find such things, we need better data than currently available in public UAP reports. The fundamental question is whether such data already exists behind classification walls within the U.S. government or its contractors. The newly established council is seeking such data.
The quest for more evidence on the nature of UAP unifies people from all political, ethnic or religious stripes. The only detractors are members of the mainstream of academia, who dismiss the anomalies. As I promised a few days ago in the Aspen Ideas Festival, the best is yet to come.
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In this essay, I featured five amazing watercolors from a series created by the celebrated artist, Greg Wyatt. They include insights from Thomas Moore, Marla Celeste, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Ralph Also Emerson. This is the 22nd in a sequence of essays, where Greg and I collaborate on the interface between art and science. The first essay in this series, titled “Music of the Cosmic Spheres,” appeared here; the second essay, titled: “Cosmic Waterfalls in Spacetime Cliffs,” appeared here; the third titled “Missing Elements in the Cosmic Jigsaw Puzzle,” appeared here; the fourth essay, titled: “Why Do We Exist?”, appeared here, and the fifth titled “Inspiration from the Stars”, appeared here, the sixth titled: “We Might Understand How the Cosmos Works Before We Understand How Life Works”, appeared here, the seventh titled: “Will the Human Survive for Billions of Years”, appeared here, the eighth titled: “The Butterfly Effect of Intelligence in the Cosmos”, appeared here, the ninth titled: “Benefits of Extraterrestrial Intelligence over AI”, appeared here, the tenth titled: “Übermenschen on Exoplanets” appeared here, the 11th titled: “If You Had an Infinite Research Budget, How Would You Allocate It?” appeared here, the 12th titled: “Are Human-Made Objects Orbiting Earth?” appeared here, the 13th titled: “Lets Send AI Astronauts, Not Humans, to the Moon”, appeared here, the 14th titled: “Our Highest Priority Should be National Innovation Centers to Complement AI Data Centers” appeared here, the 15th titled “The Cosmic Shells That Seeded Life” appeared here, the 16th titled “Chasing Alien Mysteries in the Sky” appeared here, the 18th titled: “The Smartest Investments in Our Future Are in Space” appeared here, the 19th titled: “The Best and Worst Are Yet to Come”, appeared here, the 20th titled “Would Alien Visitors Possess Intelligence Based on Silicon Chips or Synthetic Biology?” appeared here, and the 21st titled “Cosmic Discoveries by National Security Sensors” appeared here.
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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
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