The Government Should Not Hide Evidence for Alien Technology from the Public
Below is a transcript of a new interview I had today with Rob Astorino on the program Saturday Agenda of Newsmax, available in video form here. Rob’s questions are marked below with the label RA, and my answers with AL, respectively.
***
RA: President Trump gave a directive to release UFO files. Does this mean we’re finally going to get some answers? Let’s bring in the expert to talk about it. Professor at Harvard University and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard. That’s Doctor Avi Loeb.
What information do you think that the president might release? I mean what do you think is actually in those files?
AL: Thanks for having me. President Trump is breaking new boundaries here and that would be very exciting.
There will probably be several waves of release. The first one will involve video files. We’ve seen some blurry videos in the past. They weren’t very informative. My hope is that we will see something more consequential, interesting, intriguing.
If we see objects in the sky that we cannot fully understand and members of the Pentagon intelligence agencies cannot figure out, there are two possibilities: either adversarial nations are using technologies that we are not aware of, or maybe we are dealing with something beyond this earth, or non-human made objects, in which case we can learn about new technologies.
We keep launching rockets — that’s what NASA does — where the fuel carries more mass than the payload. That’s in order to overcome the pull of the Earth’s gravity. However, if, for example, we would have had a way of producing an object with a negative mass, we could have attached it to the payload. If it has exactly the same mass and it’s negative, then the total mass of this system is zero, and it doesn’t feel any gravity. You can just give it a small push and it will escape from the Earth. So, there are possibilities of extending the technologies we’ve used in the past for maneuvering or traveling that we may not be aware of.
It’s a learning experience. At the very least, it’s important for national security if all the UFOs are produced by humans. But if we happen to find even one out of a million objects that was not produced by humans and is technological, it would be the biggest discovery of human history. And President Trump will go down in history as the person who allowed the scientific community to learn that.
RA: So, you know, it used to be that people were embarrassed to say, I saw something in the sky. I didn’t know what it was. It was a UFO. And they would keep it to themselves. Now you got airline pilots, Navy and Air Force pilots shooting this video saying, I don’t know what the heck that was. So, it’s becoming much more mainstream. We have a congressman, Tim Burchett, who said: “When I’ve been briefed by government officials on video pictures, some of the best trained pilots in the world have described having close collisions with some sort of aircraft or apparatus. And so, I think it’s time that they come clean. I don’t know if it’s about little green men or flying saucers, Mr. Morgan, but I do think it’s about disclosure. It’s about transparency.”
So that’s the thing. I mean, we equate UFOs with, like he said, the little green men or something like that. And must that be the case?
AL: No, no not necessarily. Especially if we’re dealing with objects that travel interstellar distances. It takes a long time and biological pilots make no sense. You would expect technological probes that have artificial intelligence.
And you know, Albert Einstein said: “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. And if you want them to be even more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
We are probably not at the top of the food chain, cosmologically speaking, because there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and we should treat our life as a learning experience as to whether any of our neighbors are visiting us.
And if they do, we can learn about new technologies, new science, well beyond what we possess right now, because we benefited only from one century of modern science and technology. And look at what we have now: artificial intelligence — another frontier promoted by the Trump administration. But the discovery of visitors could be even more consequential for the future of humanity.
RA: I know plenty of people who paid. I don’t know what it was to have a star named after somebody, but that’s a whole other story. Jack Nicholson said: “You can’t handle the truth.” I’m among many that think the government has a lot of information that they’re not telling for a variety of reasons. Is it because they think we can’t handle the truth?
AL: I don’t think that’s a good reason, because if you find a tennis ball in the backyard of your home and then you sit at dinner with your family members, you will surely tell them that there might be a resident on your street who threw this tennis ball, because this resident might show up at the front door at some point, or affect their life in other ways. And so, it makes no sense to hide this fact from your family members.
We are all in the same boat and the government has other responsibilities, especially national security. The Pentagon and the intelligence agencies have to worry about objects produced by adversarial nations. So, it’s really not their duty to worry about what’s outside the solar system. That’s my day job. And I will be delighted to help the Trump administration figure out what these objects are.
It’s unclear whether the most intriguing data will be released in the first wave. There must be some data from satellites and other sources that cannot be released because it was collected by classified sensors, and we don’t want adversarial nations to be aware of our capabilities. But nevertheless, if there is something there, we should all know about it. And I will be the first, you know, to respond to this opportunity. President Trump has me at “hello”, if he wants me to help the government figure things out.
RA: All right, really quick, because you are a very smart man. And that’s why we bring you on because we really do value your opinion. Do you believe that there is evidence of a non-human alien life form or something that the government has in its possession?
AL: I don’t know, I have to see the evidence before telling you. I was never exposed to that evidence and therefore I have no idea. And if they do have such evidence, that would be remarkable. It would make my life worth living as much as for a whole generation. It will inspire humanity to do better. It will change our priorities. Altogether, I think it will bring us to a better place. It is just like realizing that you have a sibling who is more accomplished than you are.
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
