From scientists operating outside academia to the halls of Harvard, discussions around unexplained aerial phenomena — the term that’s supplanting “unidentified flying objects” — are on the rise.
Elon Musk says “we are probably alone” in the universe.
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has a response: “Wanna bet?”
Loeb is so confident that intelligent life is out there that he’s willing to make a real cash wager with the world’s richest person.
“I’m willing to put one percent of my fortune up against one percent of Elon’s,” Loeb tells FirstPrinciples from his office at Harvard, where he is Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics.
By 2035, he bets that instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope, Vera C. Rubin Observatory, and other powerful telescopes will find evidence of life elsewhere in the cosmos.
Loeb acknowledges the vast difference in their respective fortunes, but promises with a grin that he will put his winnings to good use: “That would give the search for extraterrestrial life the amount of money allocated to other big scientific endeavors, like the search for dark matter or the Higgs boson.”
UAP: Rebranding UFOs as serious science
Loeb’s office is bedecked with ephemera from his many speaking engagements and media appearances. Facing outward from a bookshelf is a copy of Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, his 2021 bestseller examining the evidence that ‘Oumuamua, an object that whizzed through our solar system in 2017, could be a form of alien technology.
Though Musk has not responded to the proposed wager, Loeb believes the bet highlights the need for proper funding in the hunt for intelligent life in the universe — or intelligent life’s hunt for us.
Loeb is among a small but growing cadre of reputed physicists willing to examine the topic of unexplained aerial phenomena, or UAP — the rebranding of UFOs, a term laden with stories of little green men conducting invasive abductions.
He’s not interested in stories, blurry photos, or gut feelings. “I want data,” he says, practically shouting to emphasize the point. “We don’t rely on personal testimonies in science.”
Overcoming UFO stigma with hard evidence
Collecting data — quantities of data so vast that no human brain could parse it all — is the ambitious goal behind the Galileo Project, which Loeb launched at Harvard in 2021. The project seeks to bring the search for “signatures of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs) from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated, and systematic scientific research.”
To that end, they collect data from multiple infrared, optical, radio, magnetic, and audio sensors to measure all activity in the sky; machine-learning algorithms then scour the data to classify objects and distinguish the known (birds, planes, drones, etc.) from the unknown.
The Galileo Project is part of a growing movement to systematically study UAPs across multiple environments, bolstered in part by recent congressional subcommittee hearings on the UAP issue. The hearings included sworn testimony by military pilots of “tic-tac” objects that fly with seemingly impossible speed and maneuverability both in the sky and through water.
Reports of such “trans-medium” objects have led some physicists to ponder whether some advanced civilizations have mastered still-theoretical concepts such as the Alcubierre warp drive and Casimir effect to create anti-gravity craft.
But hard evidence, Loeb says, is the only antidote to the stigma felt by scientists who get close to the topic.
As a Harvard astrophysicist, Loeb brings a level of credibility to a topic that scientists have traditionally focused on discrediting. Speaking openly about UFOs/UAP has long been considered a surefire scientific career-killer, but the mood has shifted over the past decade with more physicists willing to tackle the topic in the open.
“It’s much better to collect evidence than to cling to narratives that flatter our ego,” says Loeb. “I define myself by moving forward rather than staying cozy in an environment that is familiar. Being sufficiently senior allows me to speak my mind without worrying about my career.”
A surge of interest in UAP
Anna Brady-Estevez, Director of Small Business and Innovative Research at the National Science Foundation, reports “tremendous interest” in UAP research from over 100 qualified scientists and engineers — a dramatic shift from 15-20 years ago.
Brady-Estevez and other panelists in a discussion on the Ecosystemic Futures podcast — including NASA experimental physicist Larry Forsley and physicist Hal Puthoff, founder of EarthTech International — discuss UAP as if their reality is a given, focusing on the propulsion technology that could explain the extreme speeds and maneuverability they exhibit.
The sci-fi baggage of flying saucers piloted by Martians is still there, Forsley says, but it’s misguided.
“Many of the anomalies we see in UAPs might be explained through advanced applications of electrodynamics,” he says. “Physics provides the blueprint, but the engineering is where we hit the wall. The gap between understanding and implementation is vast, but not insurmountable.”
From ridicule to reputable research publications
Although progress against the stigma is hard fought, says Puthoff, the UAP topic is getting serious scientific scrutiny: “This stuff is making it into physics journals, if you know where to look.”
One paper published on arXiv in late 2024, “A Civilian Astronomer’s Guide to UAP Research,” was co-authored by Beatriz Villarroel, an astrophysicist with the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) in Stockholm.
Villaroel writes:
Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) have historically been stigmatized and regarded as pseudoscience due to a general lack of robust evidence. Recently, however, the subject has gained interest among astronomers and the military. The change of nomenclature from “flying saucer” to “UAP” is intended to reduce the stigma and ridicule related to the topic.
Villaroel, like Loeb, argues in favour of demolishing existing taboos with data.
UAP discussions hit the mainstream
Curt Jaimungal, host of the popular YouTube series and podcast Theories of Everything, has sensed a shift in the scientific zeitgeist about UAP — and has helped accelerate it by giving physicists a platform to explore unconventional topics.
Jaimungal initially launched his platform to interview intellectuals about deep topics spanning physics, philosophy, and mathematics (the latter being his major at the University of Toronto, where he also learned filmmaking). He remembers when the topic of UAP suddenly came into the mix: after a 2017 article in The New York Times revealed American military encounters with UAP.
“At the time, I didn’t think there were any physicists exploring this topic so I didn’t even think to search for them,” Jaimungal tells FirstPrinciples from his Toronto studio. “I just thought physicists don’t touch this subject — it’s too fringe. I’ve interviewed hundreds of theoretical physicists and I never asked one of them about UAP until quite recently.”
After 2017, Jaimungal began hosting long-form conversations on the subject with researchers including Stanford pathology professor Garry Nolan, US Air Force pilot Ryan Graves, and ex-Pentagon whistleblower Luis Elizondo. A number of Jaimungal’s guests have testified about the reality of UAP before the US House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation.
Kevin Knuth, a professor of physics at the University of Albany since 2005, spoke with Jaimungal about UAP for nearly three hours on an episode of Theories of Everything.
“I’m a physicist, so I’m curious,” Knuth told Jaimungal. “And I’m often surprised at how uncurious some of my colleagues are.”
Knuth is a computational physicist whose research focuses on designing and implementing machine learning algorithms for data analysis of physical systems — not directly about UAP, but he’s applying some of that know-how to study UAP on the side. Though he understands why academia is obdurate about addressing UAP, he believes the pace is about to quicken.
“Scientists are finally catching on — this is a rich area for discovery, filled with unknowns,” Knuth said in another interview. “It’s time to bridge the gaps between SETI, exoplanet research, and UAP studies as part of a larger discipline. It’s not just one Nobel Prize waiting; there are many to be won.”
Still, the UAP stigma persists
For Jaimungal, the topic has proved to be a double-edged sword — intriguing but still inextricably connected to pseudoscience. His willingness to host conversations about UAP have made him the target of both praise and criticism — probably more of the latter.
“I do think the conversation is shifting, but…” he trails off, implying that it’s not shifting fast enough for him to fully embrace it. Asked whether he believes his UAP-themed episodes have helped or hurt his ability to recruit top physicists and mathematicians as guests, he replies quickly: “Hindered, absolutely hindered.”
While the stigma around UAP is diminishing, it’s still enormous. The scientists talking openly on the subject are vastly outnumbered by those who, whether genuinely or for the sake of career security, dismiss the topic as pseudoscience.
Traditional academia tends to be risk-averse, especially when money is involved, so the funding for UAP-related research at universities remains practically nil. This creates a tricky catch-22: It’s very hard to conduct unconventional research without proper funding, and it’s very hard to get funding for research that’s too unconventional.
Operating outside of academia
“Academia is not going to get any money to do this,” says physicist Jim Segala, who deliberately avoided traditional academia partly for that reason. “The (researchers) out there that are privately funded… Those are the ones pushing this forward.”
Segala went back to university for his physics PhD later in life, after a successful career in engineering that shielded him from the career-advancement fears that keep younger scientists striving for the tenure track.
He reached out directly to Puthoff — who also serves as director of EarthTech’s Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin — asking to help with the organization’s research into “innovative space propulsion and sources of energy.” Puthoff’s own UAP research spans decades thanks to numerous private supporters — most notably Robert Bigelow, the near-billionaire founder of Bigelow Aerospace.
Because Puthoff and Segala operate outside of traditional academia — and because they are willing to appear on infotainment TV shows like The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch — their work will be dismissed by many. Segala is okay with that, saying the alternative is to be stifled within academia.
“If I had gone down the road of academia, I would probably be wrapped up in the same type of stigma, not being able to break out of it,” he says. “I’d be so reliant on government funding or wherever the money is coming from.”
A radical idea whose time has come?
Sitting in his woody office at Harvard, surrounded by books, Loeb is in some ways the embodiment of academia.
That’s what makes Loeb’s UAP research so unconventional — it is happening at Harvard, the quintessence of American academia, where serious scholars study serious things. Loeb recently spent hours cleaning out old files to make room for a soon-to-arrive pair of bronze statues of Galileo, donated to him by renowned American sculptor Greg Wyatt.
Loeb is convinced that the greatest obstacle to understanding the UAP puzzle is academic hubris. He hopes the statues will perpetually remind him that some radical scientific ideas (like Galileo’s then-heretical claim that the Earth revolves around the Sun) take time to find acceptance among mainstream thinkers — and even tech billionaires.
“The only way for us to learn the answer is by doing the hard work of searching for the evidence,” says Loeb. “For me, it’s not about believing. It’s about having the data. Science is not about belief — it’s about evidence.”
Colin Hunter is a science communicator, filmmaker, and contributor to FirstPrinciples. He previously led the communications teams at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo.
