Avi Loeb: The Interstellar Object the CIA Wouldn’t Discuss

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Intuit TurboTax. See guarantee details at TurboTax.com slash guarantees. Only available with TurboTax experts. Real-time updates only in iOS mobile app. I'm here on the job site with Dale, who's a framing contractor. Hey, good morning. Dale traded up to Geico Commercial Auto Insurance for all his business vehicles. We're here where he needs us most. Yep, they sure are. We make it easy for him to save on all his insurance needs. All in one place. With coverage that fits his business and bottom line. Oh, I shouldn't have looked down. It's alright. We're so far up here. Look at me. Take a deep breath. No, I'm good. So good. Get a commercial auto insurance quote today at Geico.com and see how much you could save. It feels good to Geico. Hi everyone and welcome back to That UFO Podcast. As always, my name is Andy and my returning guest today is Avi Loeb, Harvard astrophysicist, head of the Galileo Project and author of the best-selling books Extraterrestrial and Interstellar. Avi's been at the center of some of the most interesting debates around interstellar visitors now for some years and how science should approach the search for extraterrestrial technology. So welcome back to the podcast, Avi. It's a great pleasure to join you, Andy. Wonderful to have you. We need to start, of course, this discussion around 3i Atlas. I imagine if I had a look at your calendar just now, your year, certainly since mid-2025, has been filled up with conversations around this mysterious object that came into our space some distance away but certainly captured the imagination of millions. And for those who might, I'm sure everyone's heard about it, Avi, but being the expert, I think, on this object, can you just summarize what exactly was or is 3i Atlas and why did it capture the minds of so many? Well, 3i Atlas is the third interstellar object discovered by telescopes, meaning an object that came from outside the solar system. And we know that because it's moving too fast to be bound by gravity to the sun. And this one was discovered on July 1st, 2025, by a telescope called Atlas in Chile. It was very bright and had a number of anomalies that immediately triggered my interest. First, it was bright. It was moving faster than the previous two interstellar objects at 60 kilometers per second relative to the sun outside the solar system. That's very fast. And in addition, it was moving in the plane of the planets around the sun, the ecliptic plane, which is quite unusual. The chance of that happening at random is 0.2%. It came within 5 degrees of the ecliptic plane. And it had a number of other anomalies as time went on that made me more and more interested in it. For example, it had an anti-tail, meaning a jet coming from the object towards the sun from the beginning, from the first Hubble image taken off it from the Hubble Space Telescope on July 21st. It was clear that there is glow extended towards the sun from the object. And that's opposite to what we usually find in comets where we see a cometary tail extending away from the sun because it's being pushed by, I mean, the dust is pushed by radiation pressure from the sun. The gas is pushed by the solar wind. And that's why we see cometary tails. But in this case, it was an anti-tail in the opposite direction that in fact was appearing again after closest approach to the sun on October 29th. So in recent images that were obtained over the past couple of months, both from amateur astronomers and from the Hubble Space Telescope again, we can tell that there is a very prominent anti-tail, a jet extending hundreds of thousands of kilometers in the direction of the sun, comparable to the distance between the Earth and the moon. And the question is, why is this jet so different than what we see for solar system comets? There must be some reason for that. Perhaps it's made of very big particles. We don't know. And in addition, we also detected nickel with very little iron, which we only find in industrial production of nickel alloys, because usually in nature, nickel and iron come together. And so the question arises as to whether that's a technological signature, that the object sheds much more nickel than iron. And there were a number of other coincidences. The anti-tail is tightly collimated in the direction of the sun, but also the rotation axis is pretty close to the direction of the sun to within 10 to 20 degrees. And again, it's a further a percent chance of that happening. The rotation of the object was determined at large distances from the sun. Didn't know about the sun, so why is it pointing in the direction of the sun and, you know, to that level? Now, there are a number of other things to wait for in the future. This object will come close to Jupiter on March 16th, 2026, and it will arrive exactly at the distance where Jupiter's gravity dominates over the sun's gravity. And that's potentially a place where you might want, I mean, a technological object might want to deploy some devices that will remain bound as satellites to Jupiter. In addition, on January 22nd, that's a paper that I just published or submitted for publication, there is a very interesting coincidence that the 3A atlas will be just along the axis connecting the sun and the earth. In other words, the earth will be exactly, almost exactly along the sun's direction from the vantage point of 3A atlas on January 22nd. And that is interesting because, again, we have never seen that for a comet especially from interstellar space. And usually for bodies that reflect sunlight, if you arrive at a position that is exactly in opposition, so the object is in opposition to the sun, in principle, that offers a surge in brightness of the object as a result of two effects. I mean, if there is dust and we know that there is dust around 3A atlas, then the shadow of the dust is directed exactly in the opposite direction to where the observer is, the earth is. So you can actually see the illumination of the dust particles in full without any shadow. And it's sort of like a full moon situation. And then in addition, quantum mechanics suggest that there is a backscatter of light that is more powerful than at any other angle. And that's within a few degrees. And so it's really an interesting situation to watch for on January 22nd because it will allow us to infer the nature of the particles that come out that are being shed from 3A atlas. And of course, when it gets closest to Jupiter, we would like to see if it deploys any object. The current folklore is that it's a comet of natural origin, but it has all these geometric anomalies of its orbit, of its arrival to Jupiter, and of its rotation axis that are difficult to explain. I mean, there is no reason why all of these low probability events will come to fruition in one specific object. And of course, if it's technological, there might be a reason for that. So we've got the first interstellar object was Oumuamua, which we have spoken about, you have spoken about countless times, you've written about it. We had the second object in 2019, Borisov, and 3I atlas is named as such because it's the third interstellar object that we have managed to pick up. Atlas, I found out quite recently, stands for Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System. Can you just tell us a little bit, because that sounds quite worrying that the last alert system picked this up. Can you just talk about the actual equipment itself and should we be worried that something got this close, you know, relative? Yeah, so Atlas is a half a meter aperture telescope in Chile. And the reason it was established together with Pan-STARRS that discovered the first interstellar object Oumuamua is because Congress in 2005 tasked NASA to identify more than 90% of all objects bigger than a football field, 140 meters, that may come close to Earth and could potentially pose a threat to a region bigger than a city on Earth. And we know about the dinosaurs that were killed by a giant impactor that was the size of Manhattan Island, very big, about 10 kilometers or so. And we would like to know about much smaller objects by at least two orders of magnitude that might be impacting the Earth because the damage could also be significant. And so, as a result of that, there were a number of survey telescopes built, Pan-STARRS is one, and Atlas is another, and the Rubin Observatory that started operations in Chile just six months ago is another one. And so, all of these were aimed at finding near-Earth objects that could pose a threat because they're bigger than a football field. And in the process of serving the sky, you know, every now and then there is an object that happens to be fast and so fast that it's not bound by gravity to the sun. So, Omomo was the first and now we have Atlas and in between them there was an amateur astronomer, Borisov, that discovered the third one. You're very passionate about these objects and you're not out there claiming, and we're going to get to this, that these are all alien spacecraft. You're talking about the possibility and you've got almost like a childlike wonder and that passion for science that why aren't we doing more? Why aren't we exploring more? And what are the, we've got a couple of these telescopes like you mentioned. How many of these objects between 2017 to now have potentially passed by that we haven't captured? Is that something you're able to work out? Oh yeah, it's numerous. The question is how do you define objects that are of potential interest? For every object like Oumuamua that passed within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, there are a quadrillion of them, 10 to the power of 15 of them that are right now within the solar system out to the edge of the O'er cloud. The edge of the O'er cloud is 100,000 times the Earth-Sun separation. So you cube that distance and you get a volume that is a quadrillion times bigger than the volume associated with the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. So if we find one of them here there should be and they are on random orbits as long as if they're natural objects right now there are 10 to the power of 15 Oumuamua-like objects and potentially 10 to the about 10 trillion about 10 to the 13 objects like 3-Eye Atlas right now within the solar system. if these are random objects that have rocks or icy rocks. However, if any of them is technological then you can't do this calculation because it may have an intent to visit the inner solar system so its existence in our neighborhood in our backyard is not a random occurrence. It's just like having a visitor from the street coming to your backyard. but it's not a random visit. That visitor has an intent and so in that case the calculation is completely off. It could be a very rare object that happened to like our neighborhood and wanted to arrive close to us for some reason. We don't know of course what it is. But in the case of natural objects it's just a huge population that is right now within the solar system we can't see most of them we can see only those that are close enough to the sun to reflect enough sunlight and so for an object like Oumuamua it's roughly the earth-sun separation where we can see it because we have you know we are looking for the keys under the lamppost the lamppost is the sun and we can see only out to some distance from the sun the reflection of light sunlight from the object depending on its size but for a football size a football field size object it's roughly the earth-sun separation that's the capability of current survey telescopes if we will have bigger telescopes more sensitive telescopes perhaps in space or on the ground or on the moon in principle we can go farther and see many more of them and basically the farther you can find them the larger is the number that you will find the number goes like the detection distance cubed so if you double the detection distance you will find eight times more as long as they are on random orbits and by the way if we don't find eight times more when we double the detection distance that may be a technological signature yeah it sounds to me a little bit like as a layman the whole Fermi paradox the idea that there are all these planets and all these suns and all these galaxies so there must be something out there that is another intelligent life definitely that makes most sense given that there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone about 10% of them have a planet the size of the earth roughly the same separation and most of the stars are billions of years older than the sun so whatever happens here happened already next to them so in other words if there was a planet like the earth that after 4.6 billion years developed the technological civilization you know that was a few billion years ago near other stars most stars and so we are late to the party and that it takes a voyager less than a billion years to cross the Milky Way galaxy so they had plenty of time to arrive near near us and perhaps the answer to Fermi's paradox is they're all around you just have to look I mean he didn't check he thought that oh they are not here with me having lunch at Los Alamos in 1950 that's why they may not be out there but that's that's not necessarily the case you know space is vast time is very so it could have been that they visited a million years ago there was no Enrico Fermi around I mean they can't visit all the time right and a million years is just one part in you know 5,000 of the age of the earth only and you know so so the chance of them visiting when he is looking for them is very small also you need to build telescopes to search for objects that may arrive near us and he didn't build any telescope Enrico and so it's very presumptuous to ask the question and say well I don't have evidence therefore it's very unlikely because it requires some effort to find the evidence and I would say it's very likely that they're out there now unfortunately the mainstream of the astronomy community is very much invested in the search for microbes there is a decision to dedicate more than 10 billion dollars to the Habitable World Observatory to look for the chemical fingerprints of microbes in the atmospheres of other planets around other stars but it may be quite challenging to do that and it will take a couple of decades to launch such a space telescope but if there is a visitor from outside that looks more like a tennis ball thrown by a neighbour it would be relatively straightforward to realise that we're not alone so my argument is we should hedge our bets and invest billions of dollars in both efforts because we don't know what would be easier When there's this chance of all these objects being out there and even if 0.0001% of them were something potentially anomalous why aren't more professionals and academics as interested in objects like the IATLAS like you have been? Yeah that's an excellent question and perhaps the simplest answer would be to say most people don't want to take risks especially in academia you want to build up a reputation of not making mistakes of not going in directions that are not productive so basically you play it safe but my argument and in fact I wrote an opinion essay about it in Nature magazine in 2010 I said that just like financial investments it would make sense to allocate maybe 50% of our resources of our research time our money funding to bonds and then 30% to stocks and then 20% to venture capital investments so the same might be true in the context of research because you never know sometimes a major discovery will only be found if you take risks and that's definitely recognized by the corporations that invest in high tech they do take risks but in academia people are very careful because their funding and their reputation depends on them not making mistakes and unfortunately that trains them not to think boldly and not to examine new frontiers as easily as otherwise and you know if we put all the resources into the beaten path and then it turns out to be the wrong path then we wasted decades and a lot of money and that often happens within the mainstream you know just recently there was a search for sterile neutrino which is a ghost particle that was suspected to exist based on anomalies in some experiments but then 90 million dollars were invested in two experiments that didn't find it and then you know there was the large Hadron Collider searching for super symmetry a new symmetry of nature at the cost of 10 billion dollars didn't find it dark matter searches are always you know looking for some particle we haven't found yet and they didn't discover it as of yet you know and there were billions of dollars invested so you can't say that the mainstream intuition is necessarily the path for not making mistakes because I just pointed out a number of mistakes over the past decade and so the difference between those risks and the risk that I'm talking about is that those risks are for some reason accepted within the mainstream and that has to do with psychology it's just a matter of a large group of people deciding that it's worthwhile pursuing these things like the sterile neutrino all kinds of dark dark matter candidates super symmetry it has no objective measure and why is the subject of you know extraterrestrial technologies not embraced this much you know that has to do with the sociology of science another aspect is that the public is extremely interested in that and so perhaps some people are reluctant to address a subject that may be very visible and could be scrutinized by the public and has a lot of attention attached to it and a lot of wrong statements were made by people who did not substantiate them on this subject so that may be a reason for some people to not to approach it but I think it belongs to the mainstream because it's such an important problem that will change the future of humanity you know that's the reason I'm working on it is because it can make us better if we realize that there is a neighbor that accomplished much more than us that was able to explore space much better than we did and you know is focused on advances that are well beyond what we imagined and just finding such a neighbor you know would have a dramatic impact on our aspirations in the future also in the way we on our priorities instead of investing all our effort on conflicts here on the surface of this rock that we all inhabit and you know the tiny earth we might realize that there is much more real estate outside so it can bring us to a much better place it will have not just scientific impact arguably the most important scientific discovery ever made but also the most impactful scientific discovery on humanity as a whole in terms of the future evolution of the human species yeah perhaps I went to the wrong school but I always thought that when I was in science classes it seemed that so many of the greatest discoveries came through an accident or someone was trying to find something else and stumbled upon something even better and it just seems that curiosity or that fear of failure is holding so many potential great discoveries back yeah and one thing to keep in mind is we are all familiar with the known unknowns these are things we know that we don't know like for example the nature of dark matter we don't know what it is we know that there is something out there but the most important discoveries are the unknown unknowns these are things that we don't even realize that we don't know and in my guess is that the technologies of extraterrestrial civilizations the knowledge that they acquired over billions of years may involve things that we can't even imagine and that's why it will allow us to grow once we recognize it it's also possible that we are looking for radio signals you know these are very primitive forms of technology and in fact there are signals all around us that we haven't yet recognized just because we are so primitive in our scientific evolution just this week the breakthrough listen project completed a very extensive research for technosignatures from 3i atlas using the green bank telescope they looked for unusually strong radio signals the kind that might suggest technology they've found none at all while this doesn't conclusively rule out every possible artificial origin it does add to the body of evidence it's behaving like a natural object tell us a little bit about that and what can we still learn from 3i atlas even though it's starting to head off well I actually recommended to the breakthrough listen research team to look at 3i atlas they looked at it with a green bank telescope just for five hours on a particular date the amount of time that 3i atlas went through the solar system from the edge of the oar cloud until it came closest to the sun is 8000 years and it will take another 8000 years for it to exit I think it's completely how should they say naive to imagine that during five hours you will see a signal for a journey that just through the solar system takes 16,000 years and more likely went through the Milky Way galaxy for billions of years because in order for that signal to be detected in a short window of five hours it means that this object needs to transmit all the time and moreover needs to transmit in all directions so that we can see it from the earth why would it transmit in direction of the earth I mean it would you know probably beam the radiation in the direction of the sender I mean who knows who the sender might be so there is the question of the time window five hours and claiming oh this is not a technological object just because we looked at the primitive means of communication which is radio communication which by itself you know is very limited but also they looked at the 1 to 12 gigahertz suppose it emits at 100 megahertz they could not have detected it but at any event a time window a frequency window an old technology sort of like you know imagine if we were in the stone age we would look at an object like you know any object technological made of plastic or something like imagine a cell phone and then we would look at it and say well it's not made of stone therefore it's not technological like this is what we are used to doing communicating by radio but who said that's the way they communicate and I have no issue in fact I encourage them to look for it but the point is that this is not ruling out that the object is technology it's completely ridiculous to argue just by looking at a very narrow window of frequency window of time five hours we can rule out that it's technological as if it has an obligation to show us that it's technological at just inappropriate and then of course there is the question of why would it transmit any signal in the first place you know the point is if it was sent from another star it takes the signal about 30,000 years on average for any star in the Milky Way one way for light to go signal at the speed of light to go from the object to the sender and then of course it needs to come back if you want to get some response so why would there be correspondence between a technological object and the sender if it takes 60,000 years for a round trip at the speed of light it's quite unlikely that interstellar travelers would wait for any signal from the sender or transmit in real time all the time because there is no benefit to that it would make much more sense to have a burst of information let's say after it finishes the trip through a journey through the solar system at the end of it transmit all the relevant information in a burst to save energy beamed in the right direction and so forth so it's very naive to imagine transmission in the direction of the earth in this band of frequencies that we use for radio transmission and moreover that it would serve any good purpose for a technological object we are used to sending equipment to Mars or the moon at these distances there is a benefit to communicating with equipment but at interstellar distances there is no way and it's just like sending your kids out of home you don't expect them to be in constant conversation with you over the phone I mean they would have their own decisions to make based on in the case of an interstellar traveler with artificial intelligence probably but they will have you know this equipment will need to have its own brain it can't wait for guidance I think my wife would argue that as soon as I leave the house I phone her straight away normally because I'm terrible at being able to go anywhere without checking up on first what I need to do one organization that is very much mainstream that irritated a lot of people in terms of 3i Atlas was NASA because they seem to be so far behind the curve in releasing data commentary images and it seemed to be the even basic amateur astronomers were capturing some wonderful imagery behind why was that and what does that say about NASA's place in this conversation well I think it was partly because officials were communicating with the public NASA officials and I think the public appreciates scientific data scientific information scientific analysis and what the officials were trying to convey is a narrative that they want the public to believe in and the images that were displayed in that press conference on November 19th were just very fuzzy very poor so you know in principle it's good to have press conferences but only when you have some exceptional data that you want so for example the Hubble Space Telescope images over the past month were quite amazing and that would have been a good reason for a press conference but fuzzy images from the high-rise camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and other cameras that were not designed really to look at an object like 3-I-Atlas were very disappointing and at the same time the NASA officials are just displaying a narrative that they want the public to believe in without getting into the details of the anomalies you see that the anomalies that I mentioned are the key by the way I'm also finishing today another interesting paper about the wobbling of the anti-tail and the tail around the rotation axis based on the Hubble images that were obtained during the month of December and there were a large number of them we were able to calculate the rotation period of 3A atlas that's with my collaborator and we found it to be 7.1 hours for the rotation period we see the jet wobbling about 20 degrees back and forth and in addition we obtained some data from the observatory managed by my collaborator Tony Scarmato from Italy and we found that the same period of 7.1 hours or so is also appearing in the brightness variability of the object so it goes up and down in brightness presumably because the jet both jets it has a jet system the most prominent jet is the anti-tail but there is another jet going backwards away from the sun which is smaller and then there are two other side jets but this jet structure wobbles around the rotation axis just like the beams of light from a lighthouse as it spins and we measure that and we also infer that the variations in the brightness of the object are a result of the wobbling of the jets because you see the jet from different angles as it wobbles and that changes the brightness of the object it's definitely not from the nucleus rotating and changing the surface area that reflects sunlight because that is responsible for a small fraction of the light most of the light more than 99% of the light comes from the glow around the nucleus January 5th you wrote an article via Medium where you talked about the FOIA request made by John Greenwald many folks will know his work through the black vault interestingly while we're talking about organisations the CIA submitted a response when asked about records that may or may not pertain to CIA Atlas and they issued a we can neither confirm nor deny now I'm not always on the side of well that means something secretive is happening but why do you feel they have issued this sort of statement non-statement rather than just deny because they probably have some record of discussions about 3i Atlas and that's why they would put such a response if they had nothing they would simply say we have nothing and they don't want to disclose the nature of the correspondence that the record they have and I can imagine you know and this is one reason that I alerted the policy makers as well as the public to the possibility that 3i Atlas may be technological because we know about black swan events these are events that have a small probability of materializing but nevertheless they have a huge impact on society so when you take a small probability multiplied by a large impact you get a good reason for considering it seriously collecting as much data as possible to make sure that it doesn't materialize the mistakes were made on October 7th you know 2023 and on September 11th 2001 by the intelligence agencies and since then they revised their practices and they do consider now black swan events meaning you have to invest a lot of effort in figuring out whether risks that you would regard otherwise as unlikely based on your theoretical model end up not materializing and you can't take those risks and you know obviously we know also about the Trojan horse story where the city of Troy residents did not do this risk assessment properly and they suffered the consequences and so I suggested that you know we should have a scale and it's called now the low classification scale where zero means definitely natural object that is of no potential risk to earth and ten means technological object that could be a threat to humanity and we should rank each and every interstellar object on this scale just to decide based on all the data we have whether we can dismiss it as a black swan event and my guess is that someone in the intelligence agencies or government more generally heard what I said and agreed with it and so they had some discussions about risk assessment based on all the data they had access to perhaps more than we do but at the end of the day they don't want it to be known because there is no reason to excite any panic within the public or we are familiar with the story of the shepherd who cried wolf too often and then when a real wolf appeared and nobody listened so it's quite reasonable for the intelligence agencies not to reveal when they consider black swan events keep them under wraps so the public would not be alerted to them and not be concerned and live its life without any worries and only when there is mounting evidence that the black swan event is about to materialize and then they will come out and say that they collected the relevant data and that we need to act on it and so as of now they don't have a reason to suspect the three atlas is a black swan event so they just hide the conversations they had Based on the lobe scale then 0 to 10 where does the atlas currently sit? Well 4 plus or minus 2 and it could be 2 if all the data that was collected over the past month or 2 will demonstrate that it's just a natural object and most of this data was not analyzed or released as of yet so I'm waiting for it in the coming months we should have it I would wait until the object passes close to Jupiter because that as I said could be another technological signature so once it leaves the orbit of Jupiter then we can I mean there is no there will be no valuable data collected afterwards and then we can look at all the data we have and I'll give you an assessment if it turns out that there will be an unusual maneuver a release of objects from this from 3i atlas or some other anomaly that we haven't yet identified I may revise the rank up to 6 have you yourself had to have any conversations around this that have been NDA or classified no I have never signed an NDA as of yet as of now and of course I discussed what I know with representatives in the US House of Representatives but I only discussed what I know scientifically so future behaviors if we get 4i atlas just say the atlas system picks up the next object the fourth interstellar object what would you like to see what has to happen for this to be studied appropriately and from the beginning we just need to use all our resources to collect as much information on it as possible now unfortunately we have only the Rubin Observatory as a survey telescope that is very powerful but only limited to the southern sky every four days it uses a 3.2 gigapixel camera and monitors the southern sky and it could deliver an interstellar object every few months but we need a copy of it a twin of the Rubin Observatory that watches the northern sky that will be at the cost of about a billion dollars I would very much support that if there is an opportunity to build such a thing because then we cover the entire sky and we have a full alert system and then at the higher level if we find a highly suspicious object that shows a very clear technological signature then I think there will be willingness to invest a thousand times more money maybe a trillion dollars even per year because the military budgets are 2.4 trillion dollars a year and so I would imagine a fraction of that because we are not protected the earth there is no defense system against alien technology threats and so in that context I can imagine a much more elaborate scheme that has interceptors that come close to incoming interstellar objects get a close up picture of them and also could potentially land on them or do something in case any one of them appears to be technological a reduced version of that could be just one interceptor that we would put in place and wait for the next big interstellar object I'm really worried there might not be something like three atlas because it came in the plane of the planets in the ecliptic plane and therefore it spends a lot of time just near the observatories that we constructed within the solar system but the other two came at a large angle and you know the disk of the Milky Way galaxy is inclined at 60 degrees relative to the ecliptic plane so I'm just worried that it will take hundreds of objects before we find another one that is so well aligned with the ecliptic plane if they come on random trajectories perhaps we were lucky but the point is that we want to have a spacecraft that waits for an incoming interstellar object and then corrects its path so that it will meet it at the right time at the right place and take a close up photograph or maybe land on examine materials even on a rock or an iceberg that could inform us about the building blocks of life near another star we have to go very large distance to do it ourselves but here is an object that took billions of years to arrive at our backyard why don't we take advantage of that so I think it would make a lot of sense to design at least one interceptor right now but if we do find evidence for a technological object then we will have an array of them that will be part of a planetary defense scheme we are defending the planet primarily against rocks right now and they are very simple to forecast because their trajectory is dictated by gravity alone but if you have a technological spacecraft that can maneuver then all bets are off it's much more complicated and we don't have a protocol or even a way an idea of how to cope with that let's finish off Avi with some listener questions so many sent over for you but we'll dive on a few subjects here lemo DC says a lot of interviewers mention the Galileo project briefly he would love you to go into a little bit more detail on how the Galileo project is coming along and what sort of anomalies and a third one in Nevada and they're collecting data the one in Nevada has three units that allow us to triangulate in other words figure out distances by observing objects from three different vantage points from three different directions and we are now starting to basically analyze that data it's extremely important to know distances because they allow you to infer the actual velocity and acceleration of the object and decide whether performance envelope of human made objects and just to give you an example there was a claim that during the war in Ukraine there were some unusual objects and but there was no distance a reliable distance estimate for those objects because triangulation was not available and so I argue that if the distances are ten times closer to the observers then they could be just bullets or artillery shells and you know it's key to know the distance you can't replace it with anything and so we will start analysing data with that in mind and we are expecting a few million objects every year now detected by us and obviously most of them would be I would argue more than 99% would be human made or natural but we're looking at the very small minority of objects that could be something else James wants to know and this is something that I was going to ask you myself but I'll give James a credit what's your view on the work on the astronomical transients from Dr. Beatrice Villarreal and Stephen Bruhl what's your thoughts on the work they have been doing yeah so that's his work that focuses on historic plates you know from 1950 the early 1950s and the fundamental question is whether we understand in those plates there could be defects in the plates that masquerade as events in the sky but they are not really so you see it one time and not in other times there could be effects that have to do with the level of illumination so you would have different systematic effects during day night and night and night time daytime and night time and it's just not clear to me that these kinds of artifacts could not explain what was claimed okay so I haven't studied the data myself but I'm very worried about using all the photographic plates that could have these systematics in them and of course if such objects existed back then they should exist also now so with the Rubin observatory in Chile we should be able to see them Kevin asks and I asked you previously around any NDA or classified conversations he wants to know have you personally experienced any gatekeeping or censorship pressure related to any of your work not from government I do get a lot of criticism and pushback from people in academia especially the SETI community and the example we just pointed out about them arguing that 3i atlas is not a technological object because they look for five hours at the radio signal in a certain band of frequencies 1 to 12 gigahertz that we use in our communication you know that shows you the mindset that they have they they just want to appease other people basically if they were serious about looking for technological signal even just radio signals 3i atlas they would monitor it for months not five hours come out with an announcement to the press no it's not technological just based on five hours they would work on it for months and have a huge amount of data and say over this very long period of time we did our best to find any radio signal we didn't find it instead what they do is look for a short window that is one afternoon or evening and just say yes we reached the conclusion that there is no technological signature here and therefore this is not a technological object so the mindset is that of basically ruling out the existence of technology and I wouldn't necessarily expect that from people whose day job is to find technology you should be eager to find the signals you should do the best you can to find this you should dedicate months and months because that's your day job right you're supposed to do that not just select a five-hour window and say that's it it's not and even if you don't find it you should admit you know maybe they don't work in the radio maybe the transmission is sporadic you know like this should these caveats should come out of your mouth when you speak with the press instead what you hear is we ruled out from the SETI community we ruled out the technological and they also resist push back the discussion that they had about considering that possibility so I just find that to be the wrong mindset and I'm not sure why they have that it's a very apologetic mindset where they're apologizing for the fact that they're interested in technological signatures and they try to appease other people by always claiming that they don't see anything and maybe that's dictated by the fact that for 70 years you know we've been searching for radio signals we haven't found it and so to me that means that we should try something else you know if you keep doing the same thing and you don't find it you better be smart and try some other technological signature right it's not all about radio signals because that was used by us early on in our technological development it may not be used by them and we should look for city lights on the night side of exoplanets we should look for industrial pollution in the atmospheres of exoplanets we should look for technological signatures that are different than radio signals from interstellar objects we should be really curious about the anomalies of 3i atlas so why do I have to actually argue my case with seti people who are trying to push back and write blog posts against anything I say and it's really personal and it's really you know always pushing back rather than trying to you know be curious about it and final question you've been involved now in the UAP topic for several years doing a lot of work do you feel the stigma around UAP research is genuinely easing and how much influence are scientists like Gary Nolan having on scientific capability well definitely in the public domain I do see a lot of interest from very serious people and those people are funders of my research but within the academic community not much has changed and moreover you have these how should they call it they're pseudo scientists they're not really scientists these are people who do not have scientific appointments they never wrote a scientific paper in the past decade nevertheless they have YouTube videos and blog posts where they denounce the search and try to push back and insult me personally for actually pursuing that and you know first of all they don't have that privilege because they're not practicing scientists I'm putting all the time and effort into the scientific research I'm doing my best if they have a better way to do it go ahead and do it but criticizing without doing science to me sounds very inappropriate and somehow they get a lot of viewers just because they make bold statements that are not substantiated and I don't you know I know some of them they call themselves a professor but they don't hold an academic position they call themselves scientists they haven't written a single scientific paper in the last decade or two they are simply dropouts many of them that didn't get an academic position and therefore they compensate for their personal frustration with not being good enough to pursue science by attacking scientists who are better than them in terms of pursuing the actual science and so the fact that they get the voice is an illustration of the current landscape online you know that anyone can say anything but they don't deserve it really yeah and I'll just add there I think there's a lot of issues with that online on both sides of it because I saw a lot of folks who were twisting your words around the Atlas to make it sound like you were saying things in interviews that you weren't and I argued many times that Avi is not coming out and saying this is an alien mothership but your YouTube video with half a million views claims it's like that and that's not his comment that wasn't the context and even there's a lot of listeners got in touch to say does Avi know there are lots of channels with AI videos of himself and it's very clear if you just look at it it's not you speaking and it's not even your voice really it's close but that must be frustrating so that I mean so the content you can trust that is authenticated is a content associated with interviews on podcasts for example or television or my essays every day or two on medium.com avi-lobe.medium.com that's where you can find my authenticated content and everything else you know is either invented to make some profit I mean they make I don't make any money out of my essays on medium.com I don't charge anything but YouTube videos do get some money out of you know people make money out of them but and in addition the other of course motivation is to dismiss the discussion and the best way to do that is by making a caricature of what I say so that they can attack it and then dismiss everything else and so that is troubling because you know the only way we can learn something new and especially on this front which is so important for the future of humanity is by conducting research and collecting data and considering all possibilities and being curious about it and honest about it and when people are muddying the water in this way they basically are destroying our chances to learn something new so by ridiculing you know a puppet image of me in the form of AI or a caricature of what I say by ridiculing that they basically close serious studies in this direction by other people because the other people make the calculation why should I pursue this subject why should I invest time and money and this is a potential answer to your previous question the reason that some academics do not engage and those that are creative do not engage in this subject is because of this toxicity that you find you know because the minute they will look into that they will be attacked personally and dismissed and ridiculed and the words will be twisted in ways that are incorrect and all I can say is that this is not a sign of intelligence by our civilization you know so the what these people achieve is maintaining our ignorance you know whether we have a neighbor or not does not depend on whether we admit that just like the motion of the earth around the sun was not dependent on what the Vatican said that the earth is at the center and the sun is moving around who cares what people say there is a reality we have a neighbor or not but that has nothing to do with whether the idea is popular on social media or whether someone ridicules this idea it's completely irrelevant and the only way for us to find out if we have a neighbor or not is to do the search and that's a point that was missed by Enrico Fermi who said where is everybody without doing the search and it's missed by all these how should I call them zealots who are just attacking the search itself and the only way we can make progress is by ignoring these zealots and moving on to the next phase in human history which is a scientific you know bold open-minded search for entities that are better than us and there is no you know if you go on dates you should aim high not aim low right now the astronomy community is aiming low in our date with life that is extraterrestrial they are looking they are aiming at microbes so imagine going on dates and just aiming at dating microbes that's not a great idea if you want to get better if we aim at a more advanced technological civilization we will learn something that we didn't know it will make us better and you know that's the policy I adopted when I searched for and found my wife I just look for something better just because I believe that the future the best is yet to come the future is better than the past and what these people who ridicule on social media what they are doing is bringing us back to the mud you know it's just like initiating a war in the world that carries everyone down the drain like what is the benefit it's a lose-lose situation I mean you gain a few inches of territory here and there like this is ridiculous and the same about intellectual territories you know when people resist changing the landscape that we had before in science they are really preventing us from getting to a higher level of intelligence perhaps the next interstellar con will be 4i tinder or 4i hinge or 4i bumble whatever it might be so that for the dating advice Avi right at the end there but listen that's a wonderful place to leave it thank you so much for your time Avi and all those links you've talked about including your medium will be in the description for folks to check out below so as always Avi wonderful speaking with you thanks for having me that's all for this episode of that UFO podcast thank you so much for listening and watching if you enjoyed the show please follow subscribe and leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcast it really helps others find the show if you're watching on YouTube hit like subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss future episodes you can also support the show directly and get early access add free episodes and bonus content on Patreon or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts Spotify or YouTube memberships all the links are over at thatufopodcast.com or in the show description below along with merchandise and more don't forget you can also pick up a copy of my book Atlas of Unidentified Flying Objects available now in all good bookstores and through online retailers including Amazon big thank you again to all of you for listening and tuning in until next time keep looking up you never know what you might see