On the Partnership Between the U.S. Government and Science in Figuring Out the Nature of UAP
Below is the transcript of an interview that I just had with Shannon Cake on Newsmax (which is accessible in video format here). Shannon’s comments and questions are marked by SC and my answers are marked by AL.
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SC: President Trump is bringing that conversation to the White House, tapping Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Avi Loeb, who’s a regular guest on our program, to help advise the administration.
First of all, congratulations. Great to see you.
AL: Thanks for having me.
SC: So, you were chair of the Astronomy department and the director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard. You’ve spent years arguing that we should be taking the possibility of extraterrestrial technology seriously. What’s the first thing you’re going to do once you get in to this white house circle?
AL: I was tasked by a representative of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (who works together with the Pentagon, the FBI and the White House) to establish a council of advisors. I assembled about 15 scientists with expertise in physics, oceanography, statistics, data analysis and psychology. We have all the expertise needed to analyze the government data.
The first thing we did after meeting was to ask for more than 50 items of information from known incidents and potentially not only videos, but also materials if they exist.
First and foremost, I wanted to salute President Trump for the directive to declassify related information. This will bring us to a better situation because there are two possibilities: first, some of these anomalous objects are human made, in which case they pose a national security threat because they hover over strategic assets. The second possibility that some of them might be non-human-made would be the biggest discovery ever made in science.
Either way, I would feel that my time is not wasted because at the very least, we are helping the Pentagon fulfill its mission. As an American citizen, my obligation is to do the best I can to advise them on the best sensors to use.
Figuring out the nature of these unidentified objects is like a detective story. We are all excited about this mission. My team members are really looking forward to analyzing this data.
The fundamental question is: what does the data collected by the government tell us? And if it’s not sufficiently conclusive, we can advise the government to collect new data with new sensors, and we will identify the critical items that need to be measured in order for us to figure out what some of these objects are.
SC: Dr. Avi Loeb, former director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard
University, now tapped as this task force inside the White House. Having had you on this program many times and had the privilege and honor of interviewing you, I feel very confident that we are in incredibly good hands with this topic as we move forward. We appreciate you. your time on this program and now your service to our nation as well. Thank you, Dr. Loeb. Great to see you.
AL: Thanks for having me.
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
