Interview: On World UFO Day, Avi Loeb, Chair of UAP Science Council, talks about UFO Files and more

On World UFO Day, we talked to Harvard professor Avi Loeb, who has been appointed the Chair of the UAP Science Council for the White House, Pentagon, FBI and intelligence agencies. He is now leading the Trump administration’s new panel on security risks posed by UFOs. Loeb and his team have asked the Pentagon for videos, images and documents of unexplained encounters and incidents.

Loeb also runs the Galileo Project, which aims to "bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs) from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent." Aliens and extraterrestrial technology have been the talk of the town in the past weeks, with the Pentagon releasing batches of files with information gathered over decades.

Now with Loeb leading a panel on UAPs, things might get even more interesting. In an email interview with WION, Loeb talked about the significance of the UFO Files release and the switch to using the term "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena" from "Unidentified Flying Objects."

Excerpts from the interview with Avi Loeb

Q. Now that the UFO Files with older records have been released, including Apollo-era transcripts and historical files, how has our understanding of foundational events like the 1947 Roswell incident or early military studies shifted?

None of the released records so far indicates beyond a reasonable doubt a non-human origin for the associated objects. It is clear that the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies are puzzled by the properties of objects that remain unidentified.

Q. The unexplained sightings are often attributed to thermal camera glitches, radar clutter, or weather balloons. How do modern military pilots cross-verify a visual sighting with advanced multi-sensor data to rule out instrument error?

Detection by multiple sensors operating in different wavelength bands (optical, infrared, radio) can verify that we are dealing with real objects and enable us to triangulate the distance of the objects from the camera. This, in turn, allows us to infer the velocity and acceleration of the object and verify whether they lie outside the performance envelope of human-made technologies.

Q. There have been several reports where objects have been seen moving seamlessly between space, air, and water. There have been no visible propulsion systems or sonic booms recorded. From a theoretical physics standpoint, what mechanisms could even hypothetically allow an object to defy fluid dynamics this way?

Water is a thousand times denser than air, and any human-made object would slow down a thousand times more in water than in air. The only explanation for such incidents based on known physics would be to suggest that the actual velocity of the objects was very small for friction to be negligible, and that the apparent relative speed was mostly a result of the motion of the camera.

Q. Has the linguistic shift from 'UFO' to 'Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena' successfully opened the doors to serious academic study, or is it just a political euphemism?

The label is less important than the quality of the data. We now have much better cameras and other sensors than decades ago. It is impossible to ignore the existence of anomalous objects given the quality of the new data. The most down-to-earth explanation is that the "orbs" are human-made drones. In case they originate from adversarial nations, this matter presents a breach of national security and must be taken seriously. This is the reason for the shift in attitude. Of course, even if one in a million objects happens to be non-human-made, its finding will constitute the biggest discovery ever made by humanity.

Q. Lastly, if data eventually confirms the existence of non-human intelligence, how do you think humanity will react? Do you think humans are ready for it because of years of feeding on science fiction?
Humanity will adapt in the same way that it did when the Vatican admitted that Galileo Galilei was right. I discussed this affair in a new essay a couple of days ago.

In the blog, Loeb recalls the time when the Catholic Church punished three scientists for saying that the Sun, and not the Earth, was at the centre. Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno faced action for their views. "The Vatican’s bureaucrats were never jailed for misleading the public, even after spacecraft provided clear images of the Earth moving around the Sun rather than being at the centre of the Universe," Loeb said. "The general public adapted to the new reality without chants for revenge after the Vatican’s 1992 announcement," he said.