Shallow Earthquakes Reported Near Area 51
On April 29, 2026, an earthquake and 15 aftershocks occurred in southern Nevada near the highly restricted Area 51 military installation. The first quake of magnitude 4.4 struck at a depth of around 4 kilometers which is considered very shallow. The aftershocks, ranging in magnitude from 1.5 to 3.7, struck at a similar depth. This is consistent with geological expectations based on the location of faults and seismicity in that region. To produce such an earthquake artificially requires an explosion energy of 2–3 kilotons of TNT, corresponding to a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon (as calibrated by USGS here).
Below is a transcript of a new interview I had at midnight last night on Jesse Weber Live of NewsNation, available in video form here. Jesse’s questions are marked with JW, and my answers with AL, respectively.
***
JW: Most of the time, if you want to catch a glimpse of a UFO (Unidentified Flying Object), you better be looking up at the skies, right? But there is now a swarm of earthquakes in the Nevada desert that has some thinking maybe they’re looking in the wrong direction. And I say that because those earthquakes happen near Area 51, which has been linked to UFO conspiracies for decades. And this earthquake swarm has some wondering if the two are somehow related. One earthquake and 15 aftershocks were felt in the area, one of those above a magnitude of 4. And even if it isn’t little green men, this classified facility has been used for advanced weapons and aeronautics testing since the 40s. So, could the next generation of weaponry be possibly taken from UFOs? Is that the source of the quakes?
Well, we may be getting some answers sooner rather than later because President Trump said Wednesday that his administration will be releasing the government’s UFO files in the near future. He claimed that the material includes accounts that “you wouldn’t believe.” Now, we’ve heard this from the president before, because in February he tasked Secretary of War Pete Hegseth with starting the process of identifying and releasing the UFO files. And since then, lawmakers have been calling for these materials to be made public, finally.
Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna has even promised a press conference addressing what she calls materials of non-human origin. So could we finally learn the truth about UFOs, maybe the mysterious happenings at Area 51 in the near future?
Joining me now to help answer those questions, Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University, Avi Loeb.
Avi, always good to see you. What’s going on with the earthquakes?
AL: It could be geological, but why would it coincide with the location of Area 51? If it’s produced by humans, then they’re testing some explosives. That would be a natural expectation because the signal comes from a shallow origin near the surface. So, it may well be that they’re testing some new technologies. Area 51 is a testing bed for new technologies that the military is developing.
JW: Well, when you say new technologies, do you mean human technologies or do you mean extraterrestrial technologies?
AL: I think it’s very unlikely that they have learned something important out of retrieval of materials from crash sites, because we haven’t seen a breakthrough that cannot be explained by the natural progression of our technologies based on year-by-year developments. I haven’t seen evidence for that on the battlefield. I haven’t seen it anywhere else. So, I would suspect that if they do have any unidentified materials, potentially extraterrestrial, they cannot figure it out. That would be my expectation.
And once President Trump declassifies some videos or other information, I’m looking forward to analyzing it, trying to figure out what it means, even if it’s not human-made. The government probably has a hard time inferring what it means.
JW: So, I actually wrote this down because I wanted to make sure I get it right. When Representative Anna Paulina Luna says that she’s going to hold a press conference about UFOs, she says, “I don’t call them aliens. I use the term inter-dimensional beings.” What are you expecting from her?
AL: Well, she is speculating here about a possible interpretation. She is extremely important in bringing disclosure to the forefront and I very much salute her leadership on that. I actually met with her about a couple of weeks ago in my office at Harvard for 90 minutes. And we see eye to eye in terms of what needs to be done. And once the information is out, as a scientist, I can help her and other officials within the government figure things out.
The fundamental question is whether an object is not human-made? or is it malfunction of cameras? Are we talking about natural phenomena that we haven’t understood until now? So, we need to examine that data. I’m sure that the people in the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies have other priorities of national security. They are not scientists. And here I am to serve the government in figuring things out.
JW: I thought it was interesting earlier on the Today Show, we had the crew of the Artemis II. They were asked if there’s other life out there. They agreed. Two of them said there has to be. Did these answers surprise you?
AL: Not at all. It’s very likely because there are 100 billion stars like the sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and about 10 percent of them have a planet roughly the size of Earth at a similar separation. So, it is very likely we are not at the top of the food chain.
When we go even to other planets within the solar system, like Mars, we might find that Martian life existed in the first couple of billions of years of Martian history. And in fact, we might even find oil if we only dare to drill on Mars, because early Mars had liquid water on its surface, in the form of rivers, lakes and oceans, and very likely had life as we know it.
In fact, maybe life was transferred by rocks from Mars to Earth. So, we are all Martians. Drilling and looking for oil would tell us how early life started. Moreover, the oil can be used for energy purposes in the human base that we might want to establish there. We will also need to provide oxygen for breathing and for burning this oil. But I’m very hopeful that there is oil under the Martian ground, because on Earth we found traces of oil dating back to 3.2 billion years ago. And that’s the time when Mars had oceans, rivers, lakes on its surface. As Earth’s twin, it should have had life just like Earth and therefore oil by now, because deposits of dead algae and bacteria ended up making oil on Earth.
JW: Tell me we live in 2026 without telling me we live in 2026. What a conversation. Avi Loeb, thank you so much. Always appreciate it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head 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 (2005–2026), 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
