The Challenge of Recognizing Alien Technology
Given the U.S. government disclosure of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), the UAP Science Advisory Council under my leadership is seeking signatures of technologies that are not human made. All we can do is use data from state-of-the-art sensors in search for unfamiliar outliers. While noticing UAP and anomalous interstellar objects, we may be blind to many others.
Obviously, our instruments are designed to measure what we already know exists. We detect electromagnetic radiation in particular wavelength bands, gravitational waves at the frequencies that our interferometers are sensitive to, particles that our colliders can produce. But we also know that our current detectors are blind to 95% of the mass-energy budget of the Universe.
Every measurement instrument reflects assumptions about what is worth measuring. For example, our sky survey strategy is tuned to asteroids or comets from the Solar System which move at about 0.0001 of the speed of light, c. A spacecraft moving at 0.1c would appear as a faint streak in 15-second exposures of the state-of-the-art Rubin observatory, and therefore be ignored by astronomers.
If a civilization evolved its technology along a different physics trajectory, they might use phenomena we have already observed but have not suspected is a technological substrate. There could also be a mismatch of timescales. A process that takes ten thousand years to complete a single step would appear to us as a static. We would not recognize it as technology in action. Similarly, technology that completes its operations in femtoseconds would appear to us as a burst of radiation, an “unexplained transient.”
The purpose of sufficiently advanced intelligence might be so alien to us that even if we knew what the technology was doing, we would not recognize it as purposefull. An ant cannot comprehend the purpose of the internet. We may be the ant in this scenario.
The act of observing is conducted through the filter of current physics and so our current concepts bias what we see.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is instrumental in UAP data analysis because it can process large volumes of data and identify outliers relative to human-made technology. For that, it needs to be trained on the properties of human-made objects like flares, airplanes, drones, balloons and satellites. The Galileo Project under my leadership is taking advantage of AI tools in analyzing the data obtained from its three observatories.
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Yesterday, I attended an exciting panel discussion in Aspen’s Ideas festival (to be posted soon on YouTube), titled “The Strange Case of Interstellar Objects,” with Ross Andersen from The Atlantic and Sarah Stewart Johnson from Georgetown University. The discussion focused on the search for extraterrestrial life through its potential biological and technological signatures.
Subsequently, following my television interview on “The Hill”, available at:
I had received the uplifting email below:
“Dear Avi,
Congratulations on your appointment to chair the UAP Science Advisory Council, advising the White House, the Pentagon’s AARO, the ODNI, the FBI, and the Intelligence Community simultaneously. That the biggest discovery ever made by humanity may be within reach of your council’s work is not a statement many scientists get to make in a lifetime.
We shared a dinner a couple of years ago when you presented to the Bruker Board of Directors at the invitation of Dr. Frank Laukien. Both Frank and I are contributors to your Galileo project.
What makes this moment genuinely historic is the political backdrop surrounding it. The degree of bipartisan consensus that has coalesced around UAP transparency is nearly impossible to find on any other issue in American public life today, senators and members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, gathering in the same room to take the question seriously. The work you are leading has arrived at the center of American national life, not at its fringes.
I want to offer a thought that I believe deserves a place in your own reasoning framework, not as a challenge to the empirical method you champion, but as a caution against a particular assumption that may be hiding inside it.
When you assess the plausibility of interstellar travel by an advanced civilization, the implicit benchmark is what our current physics permits. And by that standard, yes, traversing interstellar distances within biologically meaningful timescales appears impossible, or at least wildly impractical. But I’d ask you to sit with this thought experiment for a moment: Imagine James Clerk Maxwell — perhaps the most penetrating mind in physics between Newton and Einstein, the man who unified electricity, magnetism, and light into a single elegant framework, holding an iPhone. Not a primitive telegraph. An iPhone. A glass rectangle through which a billion people exchange moving images, communicate across oceans without wires, and access essentially all of recorded human knowledge in seconds.
What would Maxwell make of it?
Not impressed, exactly. Categorically dumbfounded. There is no translation available to him. The device doesn’t merely exceed what Maxwellian physics can do — it requires conceptual scaffolding that doesn’t exist in his universe: solid-state quantum mechanics, semiconductor physics, integrated circuit architecture, packet-switched networks, satellite communication. These aren’t extensions of his framework. They are revolutions that haven’t happened yet.
And here is the uncomfortable parallel: Maxwell was operating at the high-water mark of scientific confidence. He and his contemporaries genuinely believed the project of physics was essentially complete. Two small clouds on the horizon — the anomalous perihelion of Mercury, the negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment — were expected to resolve themselves. They didn’t resolve. They detonated. And from those two small clouds came Special Relativity, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics, frameworks so alien to the Newtonian worldview that they would have been literally unthinkable to the scientists who preceded them.
This is not an argument that UAP are extraterrestrial in origin. I would not insult your rigorous empiricism by making that leap. It is, rather, an argument about the epistemic posture we should adopt when evaluating that possibility.
Our current physics is extraordinary. It is also probably incomplete. We cannot reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity. We cannot explain what 95% of the universe is made of. We don’t know why the cosmological constant is what it is. These aren’t minor loose ends, but rather fundamental fissures in our understanding. Within our current framework, the Alcubierre metric permits faster-than-light travel in principle; we just don’t know how to engineer it. Wormhole topology is mathematically valid; we just don’t know if it’s physically realizable. These are solutions that fall out of our own equations, and we haven’t solved them yet.
Now consider a civilization that has had a billion-year head start. Not a thousand years. Not a million. A billion — the approximate age difference between the earliest Sun-like stars in our galaxy and our own. In a billion years from now, if our civilization survives, what will our physics look like? What will our engineering look like? Is it plausible to claim that we, today, can assess the travel capabilities of such a civilization using the tools available to us in 2026?
This is the Maxwell problem. And I believe it deserves explicit acknowledgment in your framework, not as grounds for credulity, but as grounds for epistemic humility about which conclusions the current evidence can and cannot support.
You have described this work as a detective story that can be resolved with better data, and I agree completely. But ruling out non-human technological origin on the grounds that we don’t know how to do it is not a scientific conclusion. It is, with respect, the physicist equivalent of Maxwell declaring the iPhone impossible.
You have expressed optimism that the era of government opacity can be replaced by genuine cooperation and transparency. I share that optimism, and I think it points toward something larger: the last thing we need, if these phenomena turn out to be what the most extraordinary interpretation suggests, is a scientific framework that ruled out the most important answer before the data was even in hand.
I look forward to watching the council’s work unfold, and to the conversations, whether the findings are extraordinary or merely extraordinary in their ordinariness.
With great admiration and warm regards,
Bill Linton
CEO and Chairman, Promega Corporation”
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
