Reflections on the First Government Release of UFO Files
Below is a transcript of a new interview I had today with Fox Weather, one out of the 23 interviews I had over the past 24 hours, available in video form here. The questions are marked below with the label Q, and my answers with A, respectively.
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Q: Well, the truth may now officially be out there. A new batch of UFO files have given the world alien fever. The Pentagon releasing a treasure trove of files digging into a bunch of sightings. The release is stirring up speculation with videos, images, and even testimonies.
All this new information even includes findings from the Apollo missions. This comes from cases that the government is calling unresolved, meaning that they can’t be explained with certainty. But we’re certain that our next guest will have plenty to say about the new documents. Joining us now, Harvard professor of science and bestselling author Avi Loeb.
Avi, I’m sure you’ve had time to comb through these files. What, if anything, has caught your eye?
A: Thank you so much for having me. I felt yesterday like a kid in a candy store because we were presented with new information and science should be driven by evidence. The existence of unidentified objects is like a detective story. It appears that the government collected for decades documents, information, testimonies and images including videos of unusual objects that the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies cannot figure out. And it’s a mystery what some of these objects are.
The collection of unidentified objects is probably a mixed bag. Some of them are human made. But then it’s a question of national security. Are we unable to figure out what kind of technologies are being used by adversarial nations against us? And that is a very serious matter and serious people within the government over the years talked about it also within the intelligence agencies.
The importance of this release is primarily psychological. It brings this subject to the mainstream of discussion both publicly but also within science. Of course, if it turns out that we are being visited by some extraterrestrial technological probes, that would be the biggest discovery ever made in the history of science. So we should look carefully into it.
That is what I’m doing by leading the Galileo project. We have three observatories monitoring the sky and using artificial intelligence to figure out things.
In terms of the information that was released, we looked at it yesterday with my team. There is no object that seems to be beyond any reasonable doubt extraterrestrial. But this is simply because the information is incomplete. Some information was redacted. There were also Apollo images of the Moon which showed lights above the lunar surface. But we know that such flashes of light can occur from impacts by asteroids. In fact, the Artemis II astronauts recorded six flashes when they flew near the moon last month. So, it’s not clear that we’re dealing in the case of the Moon with anything that is not natural. The thousands of images taken by the astronauts didn’t show anything orbiting the moon.
All in all, I think this is really the first batch. There will be additional ones in the coming months and the next one should be particularly interesting because Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna requested 46 videos from the Pentagon and they were not included in this batch but should be included in the next one. We are just waiting to see more data. The best is yet to come because the better data is more scrutinized by the bureaucracy of declassification. My hope is in the future it will get even more interesting. This is absolutely fascinating just the findings that are being released.
Q: Does this give us any sort of positioning on if extraterrestrial life could be of existence?
A: Let me start with the point that we’re probably not at the top of the food chain, because there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone and there are about a 100 billion galaxies like it in the observable volume of the universe. So, assuming that we are the most accomplished civilization that ever lived and that Elon Musk was the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the Big Bang, is really arrogant.
What we should do to figure out who our neighbors are is to look around us. If there are objects that look unfamiliar and appear to be technological, they would actually educate us about capabilities that we don’t have. It’s very exciting to look for such evidence and I salute President Trump for taking the initiative on releasing the UFO files as I’m looking forward to additional data.
Obviously nowadays there are sensors that are much more sensitive than those that were employed decades ago. The question is what do they show? What are the satellites that are monitoring Earth showing? Such data is classified because the sensors used right now are most sensitive. But I’m excited to help the government figure out what these objects are, including taking more data as the Galileo Project is doing.
Q: You mentioned that we aren’t at the top of the food chain. That might be a little bit unsettling for some folks to hear at home. And with the release of these files, what should the average person take away from all of this?
A: That your life can be interesting if you are driven by curiosity; if you don’t pretend to be the adult in the room that knows the answer in advance. And actually, that’s what science is all about, being curious. Unfortunately, one does not find this curiosity in many adults because they don’t take risks. They prefer to believe in things that are already known rather than imagine that there are important things that we don’t know. But throughout my career — which spans about half a century in physics, I learned that our knowledge is an island in an ocean of ignorance. We don’t even know what 95% of the universe is made of. We call it dark stuff: dark matter, dark energy. So, there is a lot for us to learn about that.
The question: “Are we alone?” is the most romantic question in science. Just as in a blind date, we just don’t know who the dating partner is. There is a possibility that they will be friendly but there is also a possibility that the dating partner would be a serial killer. So we need to check what is out there rather than bury our head in the sand and say we don’t want to look out.
Q: Well, dovetailing off of that, if in your opinion we aren’t at the top of the food chain, should we be concerned as a civilization?
A: I think it will bring us to a better place just like President Reagan said, because we are all in the same boat, all humans. Right now, if you listen to the news, we’re engaged in a lot of conflicts with each other on this rock that we were born on. And that’s a very limited view because if we realize that we have a neighbor, the situation would just be like someone knocking on the front door of your home. Suddenly all the loud arguments within your family quiet down because you realize there is someone else out there. And so, I expect that if we do find that we have a neighbor, we will change our priorities. Instead of investing $2.4 trillion in military budgets worldwide per year, maybe we’ll spend some comparable amounts of money on space exploration. Because if someone is visiting us, we should protect the planet. Planetary defense is required to mitigate any risk that might come from an alien technology. But secondly, we might want to visit the backyard of the senders if we realize that they visit our backyard. Altogether, I think that an interstellar visit would inspire us to learn about new science, new technology that we don’t possess right now because we just have one century of modern science and technology. Imagine what is possible within a thousand years, a million years. The age of the universe is 13.8 billion years. And the sun was formed only in the last one third of cosmic history. We are late to the cosmic party. It takes the Voyager spacecraft less than a billion years to cross the entire galaxy. So they could have arrived here before humanity even existed.
We need to learn who is in our neighborhood rather than assume that we are the best that ever existed. Humans used to think that we are at the center of the universe. That’s definitely not true. The Vatican admitted that in 1992.
Q: All fascinating stuff. I think you bring up some great points and we appreciate your time to chat with us here this morning. Thank you Avi Loeb, author and professor at Harvard University. We appreciate it, my friend, and keep searching for answers. We all appreciate what you’re doing. Thank you so much. And you will hear if we find something. I’m sure we will.
Hopefully get to check back in with him if we do. Absolutely fascinating. Yeah, it really is. I love what he said about being curious, too. I think he brings up a good point. We need to collect more data, right? We absolutely have to and just be open to what’s out there. I love the transparency that we’re seeing with finally getting information on the facts that we’ve heard about for generations.
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In closing, here is a new message that I had received earlier today:
“Dear Dr. Loeb,
I am writing to you all the way from Manila to simply say: thank you.
With the recent UAP disclosures and the world currently buzzing with questions about what lies beyond, your relentless dedication to looking for anomalies has been incredibly inspiring. Thank you for seeking the truth, for keeping an open mind, and most importantly, for sharing all your findings with the rest of us. Watching your research unfold has been a truly meaningful adventure, and we deeply appreciate the courage it takes to lead this conversation.
Your work has inspired my own art. As a music producer here in the Philippines, I recently created a track that channels the mystery, the wonder, and the romance of the unknown that you study every day. It’s essentially an acoustic “love song to the aliens,” and I wanted to share it with you as a small token of my appreciation:
“You’re an Alien II” (Acoustic)
Sending you all the Filipino love and respect, brother. Please keep looking up, and thank you again for the profound journey you are leading humanity on.
Warmly,
GuileTheGoat / Father.G
Golden Goat Film Productions
Quezon City, Philippines”
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. 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
