Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] An Interview with Dr. Avi Loeb of the Galileo Project

Episode Date: May 4, 2023

In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Avi Loeb. Dr. Loeb was the longest serving chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy from 2011–2020. In June 2020, he was sworn in as a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. And, most relevant to today’s conversation, he is also currently the head of Harvard’s Galileo Project whose mission is the systematic scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial technological artifacts.NEW Class from Dr. James MaddenUnidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the WorldFour-week online class via ZoomWednesdays, March 27 – April 24 (skips April 10), 20247 – 9 pm ETLearn More About the ClassSign Up NowGET THE EPISODE BRIEFMENTIONED IN THIS EPISODEThe article written by Avi Loeb & Sean Kirkpatrick: Physical Constraints on Unidentified Aerial PhenomenaFOLLOW THE GALILEO PROJECTWebsiteTwitterCONTACT IN THE DESERTSee Dr. Avi Loeb, Graham Hancock, George Noory and many more incredible speakers at Contact in the Desert taking place June 2-4, 2023.Tickets are on sale now: https://contactinthedesert.com/BECOME A PATRONGET THE BOOK|Get a SIGNED COPYGet it on AmazonFOLLOWWebsiteTwitterFacebookMUSICTheme: Cabinet of Curiosities by Shaun FrearsonBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You've felt it, haven't you? I felt that energy in the room shift a little bit. That chill. We were woken up by this howling. That shadow. And you would see this shadow just kind of creep out from around the corner of the dining room. You're being watched. Six and a half foot tall and skinny came from behind me.

Others have seen it, felt it, experienced it. And suddenly, there's these loud, bang, bang, bang. And now they're ready to tell you everything. I saw an entity. Playing on a Ouija board and summoning a demon. Join us in darkness as we share first-hand encounters from beyond the veil, told by the very people who lived them. I felt a giant lick right across the right side of my face.

Yeah, that was strange. This is Geist. All new episodes. Now channeling from Spector Vision Radio. Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. In this episode, I've had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Avi Loeb. Dr. Loeb was the longest serving chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy from 2011 to 2020.

In 2020, he was sworn in as a member of... of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. And, most relevant to today's conversation, he is also currently the head of Harvard's Galileo Project, whose mission is the systematic scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial technological artifacts. More recently, Dr. Lope has been in the news as a result of an article that he recently published alongside the director of the new All-Domain Anomily Resolution Office, or Aero, Sean Kirkpatrick, regarding the possibility of an alien mothership in our solar system that created quite a stir.

And of course, as you'll recall from my recent conversation with Christopher Sharp of Liberation Times, Sean Kirkpatrick just testified in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities back in April. As a result, over the last few weeks, there's been a lot of talk in the community about the relationship between Arrow and the Galileo Project, with many expressing concern that the involvement between the two might eventually hinder the Galileo project's ability to independently report their findings to the public. There have also been questions about how the Galileo Project may be intentionally or not propping up and lending credibility to Arrow in a way that may not be reflective of its actual level of scientific rigor and transparency. After certain statements made by Sean Kirkpatrick in front of the Senate subcommittee that were perceived

by many to be an obfuscation, if not an outright denial of the facts, this has become a particular concern. I asked Dr. Loeb about some of these issues in this interview, and I would like to thank him for being willing to answer these questions so thoughtfully and directly. And I'll say that, overall, I found his statements on these topics to be well-reasoned and credible. Obviously, though, you should listen for yourself and make your own determination. But I think that's something that is important to understand as you listen to Dr. Loeb is what the Galileo Project actually is and how it goes about pursuing its mission. There is a tendency in the community to project onto the Galileo Project what we want it to be, how we want it to operate, and the kinds of

things that we'd like it to pursue based on our own beliefs and pet theories. And often these projections are created with very little awareness of how a scientific endeavor like this actually is conducted. You can't do real science by casting the widest possible net. The scientific method requires a process of winnowing down, of getting increasingly granular and isolating variables. It involves asking very specific questions within very specific parameters, and the Galileo project is doing exactly that by very specifically looking for technological objects that have come within near-Earth range from somewhere outside of our solar system. It's fascinating and tantalizing work, and as you'll hear in this interview, they have some very

serious leads to pursue. If Dr. Loeb and his team are successful, what they will have accomplished will be of monumental importance. They will have proven the existence of other intelligent, technological civilizations within the universe. And that's huge, obviously. But we also need to recognize that there are a lot of things that, by the very nature of their scientific organization, they are not investigating, which includes most of the other

established hypotheses for the origins of the UFO phenomenon that we've already discussed on this podcast. They are very specifically looking for extraterrestrial technological civilizations from another solar system. And if they find that evidence, it may or may not explain part or all of the UFO phenomenon. Because, as Dr. Loeb points out in this episode, if something is coming here from somewhere deep in space, it very well could be from a civilization that was wiped out a billion years ago. So, while I find Dr. Loeb's responses to my questions to be logical and legitimate and fair, it does call into question for me why it is that Aero seems so eager to align itself with the Galileo project. The UFO phenomenon very clearly seems to be the result

of an intelligence that is very much local to and present on Earth. As Avi himself, he himself, points out in this episode, there is a one-to-one correlation between population density and UFO sightings, which suggests that this is happening all the time, everywhere on the planet. The idea that we're going to be able to explain even a fraction of those sightings with probes coming from millions or even billions of light years away is certainly possible, but it also seems pretty unlikely given the ubiquity of the UFO presence. So, to me, this alignment between Aero and the Galileo Project seems like more of the usual distraction and sleight of hand on behalf of the government in order to increasingly muddy the waters on the nature of the UFO phenomenon. Now, I can't prove that.

It's just my opinion. And as always, I'd very much encourage you not to take my word for that. Look into this more deeply and decide for yourself. But I will say this. As we discussed back in episode 11 about the emergence of UFO lore, our modern conception of the UFO phenomenon, specifically that it represents extraterrestrial beings coming to Earth in saucer-shaped craft and sometimes abducting people, is largely a result of how it has been betrayed by the government and in the media. When the UFO phenomenon first emerged in the public awareness in 1947,

the extraterrestrial hypothesis was just one of many possible explanations, But over time, through repetition and constant association between the two, the public at large have become conditioned to see UFOs and aliens as being one in the same, to the point that it's hard for people new to this topic to even wrap their heads around the idea that it could be something else. And while I'm not ruling anything out, I think that the best argument against the extraterrestrial hypothesis is that it's the only one that the government, and by extension the media, ever seem to acknowledge. That said, I have nothing but respect for what the Galileo Project is doing.

I think it is of profound importance to our species as a whole, and I wish them nothing but luck in success and the work that they're doing. And if you'd like to hear more from the brilliant Dr. Loeb, he will be a speaker at Contact in the Desert happening June 2nd through 4th in Indian Wells, California. They have a great lineup of speakers this year as well, including Graham Hancock, George North, Norrie, Richard Dolan, Paul Heinek, Ben Hansen, J. Christopher King, Cheryl and Linda Costa, and many more. Tickets are on sale at Contactinthe Desert.com, and the link is in the episode description. All right, without further ado, here is my conversation with Dr. Avi Loeb. The stated mission of the Galileo Project is to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological

signatures of extraterrestrial technological civilizations from anecdotal. observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated, and systematic scientific research. And I think it's really important to note that this effort is different from many other previous attempts to look for signs of extraterrestrial life because you're actually looking for physical objects as opposed to electromagnetic signals. So the universe is a very big place. So Dr. Lope, where do you even begin looking when you're looking for signs of alien technology? Well, we first obviously have to look in our backyard because guided by experience when we go out to our backyard, we often find the rocks that we are familiar with. But every now and then we see a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor.

And in general, it's good to check your backyard and especially the mailbox that you have in front of your house because there may be packages. And the good news is the packages may have not arrived at the time that the sender is alive. The sender may be dead by now, but they keep accumulating just like plastic in the ocean. And interestingly enough, we haven't checked our backyard until the last decade. So when Enrico Fermi asked, where is everybody? He was a bit lazy. He was looking around himself there in Los Alamos at lunchtime and asking, where are our neighbors?

I don't see anyone. but that's presumptuous because why would they come exactly to Los Alamos exactly at the time that he's having lunch over there. And the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years. Most stars from billions of years before the sun. And it's quite likely that if there were technological civilization, they died by now. We will probably not survive on earth within a billion years because the sun will boil off all the oceans on earth within a billion years. It will brighten up. So the idea is it's much better not to search for.

for radio signals the way we did for 70 years, the way the SETI community did, because this is just like waiting for a phone call at home. Nobody may call you at the time that you're listening, but if you check your mailbox for any packages, you know, any chemical rocket that may have been launched over the past billions of years within the Milky Way galaxy did not escape from the Milky Way because its speed was an order of magnitude lower than the escape speed from the gravity of the Milky Way. So all these spacecraft must be still around. They're moving within the Milky Way galaxy.

There may be space trash by now, the way Voyager would be in a billion years. But we could look for them. And what intrigued me the most is that in 2017, we discovered the first object from outside the solar system, the size of a football field. And as you know, the biggest rocket that we are aiming to launch right now is actually Starship, and it's not as big as a football field. And this first object was very weird. It didn't look like the rocks we had seen in the solar system before.

It was given the name Omoa Muamua, which means a scout in the Hawaiian language, and it was most likely flat, had a very extreme shape based on the reflection of sunlight, and was pushed away from the sun by some mysterious. force without showing any cometary evaporation. So it wasn't clear what it is. It didn't look like an asteroid or a comet that we are familiar with. And this is what intrigued me as an astronomer to start thinking about objects near Earth.

And together with my student, we discovered two other interstellar objects, actually that arrived to Earth before Omoa Muamua, one in 2014 and the other one seven months before Omoa in 2017. And there were meteors. just collided with Earth, roughly the size of half a meter to a meter, so much smaller than Omoa by a factor of 200. But they were weird in their own way. They were tougher than all the meteors ever recorded in the NASA catalog of fireballs over

the past decade. And that made them tougher by at least an order of magnitude than even iron meteorites. And so it's very peculiar. What are these first interstellar objects that look so different than the rocks we are used to, which leads to the possibility that they might be artificial in origin, spacecraft perhaps? And we are going to the Pacific Ocean in a few months in summer 2023 to retrieve any relics from the first interstellar meteor and stay tuned. I mean, we will be able to examine the composition of the fragments if we find any.

I very much hope we will find. And that's what led me to this. That's really interesting. When I let people know that I was going to be interviewing you, some of the most common questions that I got were about that expedition. I know people are very excited about it. One of the questions I got the most was, how do you retrieve an interstellar object like that from the ocean floor?

Can you tell us how you're even able to spot something like that? Right. So as a result of friction with air, this object disintegrated. It basically created a fireball. That's how it was discovered by sensors that the US government owns, either satellites or ground-based seismometers or other means. So the fireball implies that it exploded. And it released a few percent of the energy output of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

And this was an object roughly the size of half a meter. So almost any material would disintegrate, basically melt with so much energy being released from the friction with air. And we know that it was very tough because it survived all the way down to the lower atmosphere of the Earth, roughly 10 kilometers above the ocean's surface. And we know that the stress on the object

was extremely high because it was moving fast, very fast at about 40 kilometers per second. And moreover, the lower atmosphere of the earth is very dense. So that's how we figured that it must have been tougher than iron. And then the expectation, I mean, we don't really know what it's made of, but if you imagine an iron meteorite, under these circumstances, it would basically melt and you would end up with droplets, the size of the head of a pin, a millimeter in size or so.

And they would rain down, just like hot rain. And when they meet the ocean surface, they would raise some steam, but then they would sink to the bottom of the ocean. Now, we don't know what it was made of, but if it was made of material that is magnetic, that responds to a magnet, what we produced already is a sled with magnets that would basically hover above the ocean surface

and attract all these particles that are magnetized. The ocean surface is mac. It's just mud. It's not really magnetic. And so we hope that we will be able to separate those. particles that might be magnetic from the muck. And it's sort of like a needle in a haystack, but the background is mud, so it could be straightforward to attract magnetic particles.

The only question is, are there magnetic particles that will contaminate our sample that are from terrestrial origin, and we'll be able to figure it out based on the composition? And then if it's not magnetic, there is a question, how do we pick up those fragments? And the idea there is that we have also a sluicing device, which is similar to the way you look for gold, which is based on the density of the particles. So we want to separate those particles that are not magnetic, assuming that they are higher density because we know the object was tough. Wow. Well, there are so many people I know who are wishing you the best of luck in finding it. That's absolutely fascinating.

And we can't wait to hear what you find there. Now, obviously in that case, we're talking about an interstellar object. So if you were to find evidence that it was somehow technological, this object, whatever it is, then obviously it would be extraterrestrial kind of by definition. But if we're looking in another situation, if you found something that was a near-Earth object or even something potentially that you found on Earth, what are the standards that you would then use to try to determine whether or not this was extraterrestrial or perhaps? perhaps from some other origin.

We know the composition of solar system objects. There are many meteors on Earth that were analyzed, but also cometary material of comets that we look at, or even asteroids. There was a mission of NASA called the Osiris Rex that landed on the asteroid Benu and material from it will be brought to Earth. We pretty much know what the solar system is made of, Because those asteroids or comets, they were the building blocks that made the planets.

And that means that the same isotopes that we find on Earth and on other planets should be found also on objects that belong to the solar system. It was all part of the same cloud of gas that was local and condensed to make the sun and the debris from the sun made the planets and all these rocks that were just like Lego pieces. We're put together to make the rocky planets. So we know pretty much what the composition of the solar system is. And it should be straightforward to tell the difference between something that came from outside. Because if it went through interstellar space, it must have originated far away because most of the stars are far away. Most of the volume that contains stars in the Milky Way galaxy is far away. So if you just do the statistics, it's most likely that such an object came from very far away,

like tens of thousands of light years away. And the conditions there were quite different because there was a different supernova, a different star that exploded in the vicinity of where the object came from. And therefore, the isotopes would be different than the ones, the ratio of isotopes, the abundances of elements would be different from the one we find in the solar system. and as a result, we can tell the difference. The only caveat that I would mention is that in the outer parts of the solar system, there is the so-called old cloud, which contains objects that are very loosely bound to the sun.

And when stars are passing by, they can dislodge some of these peripheral objects from the solar system, but they can also deliver objects from other stars to the vicinity of the outskirts of the solar system. And so if there is an object that comes from the periphery of the solar system, it could have been borrowed from a passing star. But what we know about this meteor is that it actually was not loosely bound to the sun. In fact, it was moving at 60 kilometers per second outside the solar system faster than 95% of all the stars in the vicinity of the sun. And that means that it didn't originate, most likely at 95% confidence. it didn't originate from any of the nearby stars. And so it must have arrived from far away.

And that makes it quite different than anything we find in the solar system. That's really interesting. How likely is it that an object like that could get kicked up and sent that far to an entirely different star system? Is that something that happens commonly or is that something that's really rare? Well, that's a very interesting question. In fact, 10 years before Omuamua was discussed, Around 2007, I wrote the first paper that tries to forecast how many rocks we expect from other stars based on what we know on the solar system, assuming that other planetary systems are the same as the solar system.

And we predicted that the telescope in Hawaii that discovered of Muamua will not see anything. And that was a safe bet by a factor of 100 to 100 million. Basically, there wouldn't be enough rocks for it to see. And the same applies for the meteors. We didn't expect any meteors from interstellar space within decades. And the surprising fact is that we saw, Muammua, we saw these meteors. And that means that something is wrong in the mass budget calculation. Either other planetary systems eject a lot of rocks, many more than expected from what we know about the solar system.

Or perhaps, you know, these are artificially. in origin, they were targeting the inner region of the solar system rather than spread randomly throughout space. And I wouldn't cast any vote on that until we figure out what these objects are. And it's really surprising that so much material, in fact, if we take the meteors and ask, if we estimate how much heavy elements, if they are randomly distributed throughout the galaxy, how much of the heavy elements produced in the galaxy do they can? carry, and we found that they carry a substantial fraction, like a third of the heavy elements.

And then you ask yourself, how is it possible that stars lose so much from their vicinity? It's not at all clear. But, you know, on the other hand, I did a calculation that showed that if or Muamuamua, for example, was pushed away from the sun because it was thin and it reflected sunlight. And by the way, this is the way that another object that was discovered in September 2020 was pushed away from the sun. It had thin walls. It ended up being a rocket booster that NASA launched in 1966, rediscovered by the same telescope in Hawaii that discovered the Muamua. And in 2020, and it was given the name 2020 SO, and obviously it was artificial in origin. And in a recent paper,

I said, well, you know, for example, if you imagine Dyson spheres, these are mega structures that advanced civilizations may put around stars to harvest their energy. If they are made of tiles that are sort of floating above the star just like kites by radiation pressure, balancing gravity. So this would be light sails basically hovering above the star and harvesting the energy. Then when the star brightens up, it will push them away and very easily release them from the planetary system. And as a result, they might appear as interstellar objects that behave like Omuamua.

So maybe Omuomua was a piece of a broken Dyson sphere. Who knows? Wow, that's fascinating. So obviously you've got this fantastic lead that you're following with this interstellar object that you're hoping to retrieve traces of from the Pacific Ocean. But does the Galileo project have any other exciting leads that you're working on right now that you're able to share with us? Oh yeah, so we have two other avenues that we do research on, and one has to do with finding more objects like Omuamua, and within a year there will be a new telescope in Chile called the Vera Rubin Observatory that has 3.2 billion pixels in its camera. That's a thousand times more pixels than cell phones have, and it will survey the southern sky every four days.

and it has a good chance of finding an a Muamu-like object every few months. And then, of course, we need to identify those objects of interest. And it turns out that the astronomy community not only ridicules the search for such objects, but also did not develop the software necessary to go through the pipeline of data from the Verra Rubin Observatory. So we are doing it with my postdoc. We developed the software that will identify interstellar object. And then, of course, we could look at them with a web telescope, which is located at a million miles away from Earth.

So if we have the web telescope and a telescope on Earth looking at the same object, they could, in principle, pinpoint the three-dimensional trajectory of the object very well. It's called parallax, just like having two eyes looking at an object and being able to assess the distance. So we can pinpoint the three-dimensional trajectory of such an object and then figure out whether it has any propulsion. And moreover, the Webb Telescope could measure the infrared emission from the heat emitted by the object. And from that infer its area and its albedo in terms of reflecting sunlight, and a lot of properties that were difficult to infer from Muamua.

So we have the Web Telescope, we have the Verra Rubin Observatory, that's fantastic for the next objects to be found. And then the second path of research for the Galileo project is looking for unidentified aerial phenomena that the US government talks about. And there is obviously a new office in government that normally resolution, all domain, in all domain office, air, it's called. And what it's doing right now is looking at the 650 or so events that were reported by military personnel intelligence agencies and trying to figure out what these objects were. And, you know, looking at past reports that were anecdotal is obviously something to do. But the frustrating aspect of that is if you see something interesting, you can't go back in time and say, I need more data on this thing. And in order to figure it out, you can't do that. And so what the Galileo project is saying, well, first, you know, most of the interesting data in government is classified.

In the past, people tried to press the government to release such data, and that's, to me, a waste of time because the data was collected by classified sensors. But the good news is the sky is not classified. So we can look at the sky. That's what astronomers do for a living. And that's what we are doing with the Galileo project. We built a new observatory at Harvard University that is functioning right now and collecting data 24-7 in the infrared optical radio and audio. And we are analyzing it, the data with artificial intelligence software. And I should say that within a few months or maybe a year, we'll have much more data than was ever collected by all the reports in history.

Because we are doing it routinely. We are doing it with instruments that we fully understand. And what you see in the past is people arguing with each other about interpretation of poor data. you know, fuzzy images, blurry images. People were expressing their views. They were either skeptics or believers, and the skeptics would argue with the believers forever and would say bad things about each other.

Just like we see in politics, you know, you have the two extremes fighting with each other. The problem. The point is that in science, if you collect good enough evidence, then everyone would agree on what it means. So instead of arguing and instead of believing or not believing something, I mean, it's not religion what we are talking about,

we can look at these objects and collect much better data with state-of-the-art instruments. And that's what the Galileo project is doing. We are already doing it. And then in the coming months, we're planning to build more copies of our observatory at Harvard. And the number of copies that we make will depend on how much funding we have. Basically, we need tens of millions of dollars in order to have. in order to have tens of observatories spread throughout the United States and collecting enough data within a year that would allow us to get to the bottom of this puzzle.

And we could tell whether we are looking at a balloon, an airplane, a bird, or maybe something extraterrestrial. Amazing. In the process of collecting that data, if your work led you to believe that the UAP data that you were looking at, that it led you to believe that it was potentially of another origin that was not extraterrestrial, like hypothetically a foreign nation or a breakaway civilization or one of the many hypotheses that's out there. Is that something that the Galileo project would pursue, or are you strictly looking for evidence of extraterrestrial technological civilization?

So anything that is human made, as far as I'm concerned, is boring. And I'm happy to share that the data with the government without even looking at it. Anything that looks like a bird I know of some zoologies that would be extremely interesting. It's again boring for me. So we will obviously see anything in the sky. But I would like to see if there is, even if there is one object from an extraterrestrial origin that would be fascinating and obviously extremely exciting. We don't need most of the, I mean, it's obviously a mixed bag.

One thing to keep in mind is the reports on unidentified objects, correlate with population density. If you do the statistics, you see that very clearly. There are places on the globe where more people are monitoring the sky are the places where you hear more reports. And that means that they are everywhere, because otherwise you won't just get a one-to-one correlation with population density. So it's clear that, you know, one thing that is everywhere is balloons.

Balloons are everywhere, either for meteorological purposes or just because of, I don't know, perhaps parties or the government using balloons. At any event, balloons are everywhere. They make up at least half of the objects that were mentioned in the Director of National Intelligence Report. And obviously, the U.S. government shut the four of them down a few months ago. So there are balloons in the sky. And obviously, there would be also drones and airplanes and birds. So the only question, as far as I'm concerned, is whether there is any of any.

I'm sure it's a mixed bag. I'm sure the data is very poor, but from the point of view of a scientist, the fundamental question, is there one object or more that is of extraterrestrial origin? So we just want to find that one or more. And of course, the government needs to figure out most of them because they are a national security threat. Absolutely. Now that makes a lot of sense.

So you recently co-authored a paper with Sean Kirkpatrick, Director of Arrow, that was picked up by the media and as so often happens, they ran with the most sensational possible headline, which was something along the lines of Harvard astrophysicist says that there could be a mother ship hiding in our solar system. Now, having read the paper, it was clear to me that while you were presenting that as a possibility, the argument that you were making was much more nuanced than that. Can you talk a little bit about what your attention was with that paper and what you were trying to convey? Yeah, so basically, Sean wrote to me that he's visiting the area and asked to visit my home, And I should say that since the pandemic started, my book appeared in January 2021 called Extraterrestrial.

It was translated to 25 languages, 28 editions, and I had about 2,500 interviews since then over the past couple of years. Just last week, I had the 20 requests from filmmakers and documentary producers to document my research. I had also a playwright who wrote to me a couple of weeks ago with the title, Abilob on Broadway. That was the title of his email and I'm already writing a play that he hopes to get on Broadway. And so there is a lot of, there are lots of things happening. And among those visitors, of course, were the ones that donated funds to the Gallup that established the Gallaudo project, but also the expedition that was funded at one and a half million dollars. And so I'm used to people coming to my home. And then so when he asked, they said, of course. And,

Then during his visit, he mentioned that it would be good to have a paper that uses what we know about physics and puts constraints on unidentified area phenomena where we might not have the full data on. Obviously, when you have anecdotal reports from the past, the data is incomplete, nobody expected those objects. So we wrote a paper. And in the introduction, I mentioned the possibility of a mothership that releases. probes. And that was inspired by the appearance of Omuamua and the second interstellar meteor. I checked their parameters and realized that they had the same distance of closest approach to the sun. They were separated by seven months. And they also had the same speed far away from the sun. And that led me to consider the possibility of maybe the meteor was a small probe, roughly a meter in

that was released from a mothership, or Muamua that was 200 times bigger. But then I checked and it turns out that they didn't originate from the same direction in the sky, so they couldn't have been related. But nevertheless, in the introduction, we mentioned that possibility because it makes a lot of sense

to release small probes if you wanted to visit planets in the habitable zone. That allows you to go to many places, not just one with a big spacecraft. and that led to a lot of speculation by people, but it was just a matter of thinking about one possibility. The other thing is we know that some of the reports involved objects that went from air to water,

and you can imagine water being fueled for interstellar spacecraft. In fact, I wrote about it in a recent essay that I posted on Medium.com just a couple of days ago, how water can be used as rocket fuel. And it could be useful for us when we go to Mars or the moon, when we build sustainable human bases there. So we need to keep that in mind because that could be a motivation for a probe to arrive to the habitable zone of around stars where there is liquid water that can serve as fuel. At any event, we just talked about general constraints that we can put on unidentified objects in the Earth's atmosphere and water.

And among them was the fact that if you don't know the distance to an object and you see the object moving fast across the sky, you can tell based on physics as we know it that it must be closer to us than some distance because if it's very far, it needs to move really fast in order to cross the sky and that would create a fireball as a result of the interaction with air, the way we see it in meteors or in, you know, very, very fast-moving object. anywhere. So that was this paper.

Oh, thank you so much. That's a fantastic explanation. So as you might imagine, given the recent Senate hearings and your work with Sean Kirkpatrick, one of the most common questions that I got from people had to do with your thoughts on the hearings. I know that you can't speak on his behalf, but what do you make of the fact that Kirkpatrick said, quote, Eru has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics. Despite the lack of a smoking gun, is it your impression that the government regards

the extraterrestrial hypothesis as a legitimate potential explanation for the UFO phenomenon? Yeah, I think the government has objects that they cannot identify. It's because the data is incomplete. And in fact, I was in November 2021, I attended a forum at the Washington National Cathedral

with Averyl Haynes, the Director of National Intelligence and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origins. And in the green room, I approached Averyl Haynes, and I said, you just delivered six months ago. You delivered the report to the U.S. Congress about the UAPs. What do you think they are? And I asked her because she was trained as a physicist

for a bachelor's degree at the University of Chicago. And she said, I don't know. And I believe her. You know, I don't think the government has any questions. conspiracies about this subject. I just think they have data that is inconclusive and they see things that are behaving in ways that they didn't expect and they cannot easily put them into a category into a bin of something that they are familiar with, either US technological objects or adversaries

because we pretty much know what the technologies that humans make are. So they don't know what they are. And the government is not a scientific organization. they are mostly focused on national security concerns. So the easiest thing for them to say is forget about it. And that was the way to it happened in decades, over the past few decades, where they would just ignore things that are not clearly a national security concern. They would say, we don't know what it is.

Forget about it. And now they want to figure it out, I guess, as a result of the Congress, pressing on them. And so they examine all these past reports. more carefully, more methodically. That's what Sean talked about, having two teams within Arrow, one of intelligence experts, the other one of scientists and engineers

that are expressing their ideas about what the data on particular cases of UAP, what does it mean? I mean, what is the inference? And then he compares those inferences from the two teams and vets. What sounds the most likely thing? The problem with this approach, as I said before, is if you have limited data, it wouldn't help much. The experts can say whatever they want, but you just don't have the tools to figure out

what the object was because the data is limited. And so they probably are doing the best they can, and they do see objects that might be of national security interest or mundane objects like balloons. They probably see some of those. And the rest that are the most interesting ones, they don't know what they are. So I think it would bring them to the same point that the Galileo project is already at, which is to say, okay, in order to figure out what we have in the sky, we better use equipment that is state of the art, that we have full control over,

that we fully understand, that we fully calibrate, and do a systematic search for objects in the sky. Instead of just anecdotically, you know, like seeing something unexpected, not really planning for it, having limited data because it was gathered by pilots in the cockpit of a fighter jet. Like, that's not the best scientific experiment to imagine pilots in the, like, or eyewitness testimonies. How do you know what people saw? I mean, when people report about car accidents, they give very different reports, even though they saw the same event. When people report about offside in a soccer match, they say very different things, depending on which team they like.

And so we don't want to rely on people. We want to want to. to rely on instruments. And we have those instruments. And it's not so expensive. You know, I just don't understand the approach that was taken in the past by people that were intrigued by these reports. They were just saying, either arguing that they know the answer, even though the data doesn't look very convincing,

or they would dismiss it, put a stigma on it, and not even explore it. And that would leave the subject in the state that we find it today, where we don't really know what these things are. And then there are lots of speculations by believers who do not have. the scientific expertise to infer what these objects are. They just believe in it. You know, you can believe in anything you want. You can believe that you are Napoleon. I don't care.

You can insist that you are Napoleon. You can even say I have an ID that shows that I'm Napoleon. But Napoleon is dead. That I know. So that would not hold water. But you can say anything you want on objects that were observed in the past decades ago, for which we don't have enough evidence. And you can argue forever about them. My point is that this is not a good way to spend your lives. A much better way to your energy is to approach it like a kid. Basically say, I want to figure

it out. I want to get more data. I want to get to these objects and collect better data than I hear about so far. That's the approach of a kid. Doesn't pretend to know more than we actually know and just goes ahead and collects the information. And that's the way

the Galileo project is approaching it without prejudice. And whatever we find will be reported. If it turns out that all of these objects are balloons, so be it, I think it will bring the subject to rest, and we wouldn't need to argue waste time on it. But on the other hand, there may be something else. That makes a lot of sense. So one of the most striking things about the hearings was the fact that despite saying that there is no credible evidence for objects that defy the known laws of physics, Kirkpatrick showed the committee a video of what appeared to be a metallic spherical

object with no means of propulsion maneuverings through the air. So would your argument here be that? that this is the right approach because they don't know conclusively what this is. And so to say that conclusively that it's breaking the laws of physics would just be overstepping without having enough data? Yeah, I think with respect to the laws of physics, the important point to understand is in order to show that something violets the laws of physics, which is definitely possible. Okay, that's what motivates most physicists. I mean, they want to win the Nobel Prize for finding something new.

But the point is, you have to have exquisite data, and that's hard work. You can't just see blog about it or have a podcast interviews where you say, I believe there is no physics. That is not good enough. You need to demonstrate that the conventional explanations for what you see do not explain it because you have such good data. You pinpoint, you can tell the distance to the object, and therefore you can infer the speed of the object,

and you can show that it's doing things that cannot be explained by known physics. You need to do that. You need to go an extra mile and collect exquisite data that nobody can dispute. And only then you can claim new physics. And what many people in the public do not understand,

they think, oh, if we see a hole in the clouds, oh, it may be a wormhole. It may be a path through which you can exceed the speed of light. Why not? I see a hole in the cloud. Of course it could be that, but a hole in the cloud is most likely a meteorological phenomenon that has to do with the way air flows in the atmosphere, has nothing to do with a wormhole. A wormhole, we don't even know that a wormhole solution to Einstein's equations is a valid one.

So talking about new physics, just because you see a hole in the clouds, is completely irresponsible. So obviously, if you have good enough data, you can argue something is doing things that cannot be explained by non-futable. physics, but you have to do the work. It's very hard work. And you can't just sit back on your seat and say, oh, I think it's this or that. That is not the way science is done. That's not the way by which we acquire new knowledge about new physics. And many people do not understand that. They think that if there is blurry images, if there is data that is incomplete, that is poor enough, then I can speculate whatever I want about it. And that would be good enough for me. No, that's not good enough. What it should motivate, I mean, it could be that there is no physics,

but to figure it out, you have to collect better data. So basically what I'm trying to say is that I was intrigued by Omuamua, by the first industrial objects, and the conclusion from that was not to say for through that I know that they were interstellar technological artifacts, but to say that they were possibly those things, and to figure them out, I need to collect more data. While my colleagues in academia were behaving just,

like those believers, they were on the opposite end and saying, oh, we don't need the additional data. These must be rocks. Forget about it. So they were saying, forget about it. The people that are believers say, I know what they are, forget about it. Everyone says, forget about it. And nobody takes the data. That's the reason we are at the point where we are, where we don't really know what UAPs are, what

these interstellar objects are. And I'm saying the only way to make progress in our knowledge is to collect better data. So I'm sufficiently intrigued to do that because my colleagues in academia are not doing that. And the public who claims they know, those people who claim they know something about new physics, they also don't do the work, the hard work to collect new data. So these are all lazy positions to take

where you don't do anything, you just argue what you think these things are, just like in politics. You know, you have the two extremes, polarized, each of them is pushing the other side. And I say that's not the way to make progress. The way to make progress is through the hard work of the Galileo project, building instruments that will collect better data and bring us to the truth.

I appreciate that. So a question that we got a lot from people also was because of the paper that you did with Sean Kirkpatrick and some of the collaboration between the Galileo Project and Arrow, some people have expressed concern that the Galileo project might in some way get rolled into Arrow in a way that might then subject you to a classification system that would restrict you from independent reporting to the public. Is that something that people should be concerned about or are there firewalls in place to prevent that sort of thing from happening? This is an excellent question. And personally, I don't want to sign any NDA because it will restrict my ability to function as a scientist to basically obtain new data.

even, you know, if I see classified data, even if I happen to reproduce that data with unclassified sensors with the Galileo project, there will always be this cloud of concern that the government may argue that I revealed secrets despite the fact that it was connected, you know, the same data was collected by unclassified sensors. And as a result, I prefer not to look at any classified data. It's up to me, you know, we have free. you will. I don't want to sign on any classified data and not to see anything so that I can operate as a scientist. With open data, the public will see whatever we find. And that is my take on it. And as a result, you know, Arrow will not share with us any classified information.

And I see the more, I mean, this kind of partnership with what the government is doing, more of an intellectual partnership where they are interested mostly in objects that might be a national security threat. And we don't care about those at all. And so what we are looking for is knowledge that can be shared with all humans. That's called scientific knowledge. Science is all about sharing knowledge, sharing data. The government is mostly interested in national security concerns. And that means that they want to learn more about what other nations are producing. And that's exactly the opposite. They want it to be classified and not open to the public and so forth.

And so what I'm saying is we are interested in different parts of the pie of data. And therefore, we can work in parallel. I mean, I don't see any conflict, but I don't want to eat their piece of the pie because it will in a way prevent me from operating as a free scientist on the piece that is supposed to be shared with the public. So no worries. we are not going to be acquired by government. Amazing to hear. Thank you. And one final question,

if the Galileo project did find evidence of extraterrestrial technology, what is your next move? Is that something that would be shared with the public immediately? People are very curious about what that process looks like. Yeah, I just need to make sure

that we are not crying wolf, right? So that the statement we make is reliable. That's all. And as soon as we figure this out, then it may take days, it may take weeks, it may take a month. I don't know how long, depending on what we find. You will hear from us as soon as we are confident in what we are saying,

just to make sure that we are not misleading the public. And that could involve the expedition. It depends on what we find out there. And my main concern is that we might not find anything. We'll come back empty-handed. And that's my nightmare scenario. But if we find something and we analyze it and whatever we find, find will be known to the public as soon as we are confident in the results.

So just so that you know, with me, what you see is what you get. That's who I am. And when I served as the chair of the astronomy department at Harvard for nine years, the longest serving chair between 2011, 2020. And on the first few days when I started, my wife said that I will probably not last very long because I'm straightforward and people can see through me and I'm transparent. and she thought that the politician needs to have some opacity, so that allows the politician to maneuver.

But I was always transparent, and it ended up being a great asset because people around me always trusted me and never suspected that I'm misleading them, I'm manipulating them, and I ended up being the longest-serving chair of the astronomy department because everyone trusted me and knew what I was always transparent about the goals

and about the way I operate. So I apply now, the same approach in this context. And what I told you is what I am, basically. And let's see whether we find anything. That'd be exciting. And even if not, at least we tried. You know, that would be my legacy trying.

And perhaps younger people will find what I'm looking for if I don't find it. Well, Dr. Lowe, thank you so much for your time today. And thank you so much for the work that you're doing in this field. It's been an absolute honor speaking with you. Thanks for having me. Great pleasure. And I'd be glad to speak again if we find something. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance.

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