by Dr Michael Salla
April 20, 2023
from Exopolitics Website

Professor Avi Loeb is the former chair of Harvard University's Department of Astronomy and founder of The Galileo Project that seeks empirical evidence of "extraterrestrial technological signatures."

His interest in the discovery of alien techno-signatures began in 2017 with the arrival of the interstellar object 'Oumuamua whose orbital behavior around the Sun suggested it was an artificial object...

Prof Loeb's subsequent papers and book on 'Oumuamua, "Extraterrestrial - The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth" (2020), has generated much mainstream interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial visitation.

In this Exopolitics Today interview with Dr. Michael Salla, Prof. Loeb explains,

the genesis of his interest in extraterrestrial visitation and the role Professor Stephen Hawking played due to his 2010 views about advanced extraterrestrials likely being hostile.

 

Prof. Loeb explains why he arrived at his conclusion that advanced extraterrestrials would be beneficial rather than hostile.

In response to questions about the role of human judgment and observation in collecting data on the UFO phenomenon, as opposed to scientific data gathered through mechanical instruments, Prof Loeb took the uncompromising position that the former is not reliable or accurate and therefore has no role in the Galileo Project endeavors.

In contrast, Dr. Salla pointed out the benefits of non-empirical data sources as a complement to scientific sources for a wide-ranging intelligence gathering approach to understanding the UFO phenomenon.

Prof. Loeb finished his interview by briefly discussing the genesis of his view that some UFOs may be probes released by an alien mothership that recently entered our solar system.




Video

Also HERE, HERE and HERE...

Transcript

Professor Avi Loeb is the former head astronomer for the astronomical department at Harvard University and in 2017 he became interested in what astronomers regard as the first genuine Interstellar object observed to have entered into our solar system.

 

He's written many articles, a book and more recently his co-written a paper that speculates that some of the UFOs that are being cited around the world may be from an extraterrestrial Mothership.

 

You're listening to Exopolitics Today with Dr Michael Salla your source for the uncensored truth regarding the hum... an extraterrestrial Global and political agenda.

 

And now here's Dr Michael Salla.

 

Well thank you Professor Lowe for peering on the XR politics today thanks for having me.

Well I'd like to begin with 'Oumuamua because it was us such an extraordinary object that astronomers observed and it, it was something that was uh... shaped like a kind of like cigar a very long object, you describe it as being a flat football field size object and its behavior was, uh... strange that led to you when you looked at the data uh... coming up with a very radical hypothesis so why don't you just explain uh... to my viewers exactly what what happened.

Yeah so this was the first object that discovered by astronomers from outside the solar system the size of a football field indeed uh... it was identified when it passed close to Earth within a sixth of the Earth's sun separation and was classified flag.

 

There's a near-earth object by a telescope in Hawaii whose purpose was to find near-earth objects and what was strange about this object was... that it was moving too fast to be bound to the Sun so it came from outside the solar system.

 

The first one identified ever and this survey of the sky only occurred over the past decade.

 

We couldn't detect objects as big as a football field from the reflection of sunlight within the Earth's sun separation before that uh... so that's why it opened the new window and then I was surprised by this because a decade earlier I forecasted that this telescope should not see anything from outside the solar system because we estimated the abundance of such rocks that we find in the solar system that may have been kicked out to Interstellar space and we found that it shouldn't see anything by a factor of 100 to 100 million uh... and then this object was discovered.

 

So that was intriguing but as this object was tumbling every eight hours the amount of sunlight reflected from it changed by a factor of 10.

 

It was clear that it has a very extreme shape and the best fit to the variation of sunlight was that of a flat object moreover it came from a very special frame of reference the so-called local standard of rest which is the rest frame of the Milky Way galaxy near the Sun.

 

So why would an object that comes from another star be at rest in that frame the stars are buzzing by at tens of kilometers per second.

 

Only one in 500 was so much at rest as this object was and so um... then as time went on the object in addition to its stream shape which was most likely flat at the 90 confidence uh... it exhibited an excess push away from the Sun and in fact there was another paper even today that confirmed uh... the original finding that there was some mysterious force pushing it that declined inversely with distance Squad from the Sun and uh... there was no evaporation of this object...

 

No dust or gas around it that could give it the rocket effect and the speeds of Space Telescope looked very deeply couldn't find any traces it was definitely not a comet of the type that we're familiar with.

 

It was also not an asteroid of the type that we're familiar with because it was pushed away from the Sun so what was it?

 

Astronomers were not clear about it. I said well maybe it's a very thin membrane that is being pushed by reflecting sunlight and the nature doesn't make such thing so um... very recently just a couple of months ago I published the paper suggesting maybe it was a piece from a broken Dyson Sphere.

 

This is a sort of a mega structure that advanced civilizations may build around the star to harvest the energy of the star and you know after a while these things break up either because of asteroid impacts or because the star evolves becomes hotter and then pushes away that that kind of a megastructure.

 

So at any event we don't know what it was but I suggest that it's artificial in origin and amazingly three three years later there was another object like it that was discovered by the same telescope in Hawaii in September 2020 it was given the name 2020, so and it exhibited an excess push away from the Sun by reflecting sunlight, no cometary tail, and then a few weeks later the astronomers realized it's actually a rocket booster that NASA launched in 1966 so we... we know that it had thin walls that's why it was pushed by reflecting sunlight and it was made of stainless steel.

 

That's why it didn't exhibit any rocket effect or any cometary tail.

 

So we know that 2020 or so was artificial because we made it the question is who made 'Oumuamua and since then I should say I discovered together with my student Amir Siraj two other Interstellar objects that arrived or were detected before 'Oumuamua, one in January 2014 and the other one in March 2017, and they were meteors roughly a meter in size that collided with Earth and then exploded in the lower atmosphere of the earth like meteors do.

 

But the two of them were the toughest among 273 space rocks in the catalog that the U.S. government compiled of meteors and the question is, why would the first Interstellar meteors have material strength that is at least 10 times bigger than even iron meteorites.

 

And in order to find out we have an expedition planned to retrieve those fragments left over from the explosion of the first meteor over the Pacific Ocean and we want to figure out whether it was some unusual rock that originated from an environment very different than the solar system, because apparently it's it was much tougher than even iron or perhaps it was made of some artificial alloy like stainless steel.

 

Maybe it was a spacecraft. So all together what I'm saying is over the past decade scientists were able to discover for the first time the first objects, big objects, that came from outside the solar system and three out of the four are weird and so we should figure out what they are well one of the interesting things about um...

 

And interestingly I was actually living on the big island when it was discovered very very clogged to the kick Observatory you know and uh... it the term means advance or scout and so that's very suggestive.

 

It's like well why did astronomers think it was something that was in advance or a scout for something else, I mean conspiracy theorists would say well you know is this an advanced craft or a fleet or what exactly.

 

Why did they come out with that name well um... The name was about it being the first object from interstellar space so Scout in the sense that it's the first one that we noticed but um... actually the email I saw the email message of the discoverers and they said it looks really weird so all everyone expected to be just like a rock from the solar system that we are familiar with it's sort of like going to your backyard you are used to seeing the rocks you know.

 

In the case of the solar system our backyard we're used to seeing asteroids or comets and then suddenly you see something different, doesn't look like a comet, at first it was called the comet then it was realized no it's not a comet of the type that we're familiar with and then people say oh... well maybe it's an asteroid but then it doesn't look like an asteroid.

 

It has a flat shape with a very extreme geometry and and it's being pushed away from the Sun. That's not what asteroids exhibit and it's sort of like finding a tennis ball among the rocks that came from your neighbor and basically delivers a message that not everything is rocks in your backyard and you know, that was a difficult pill for the astronomy Community to swallow.

 

And I did not feel attached to rocks.

 

I mean as far as I'm concerned you know if there is no cometary tail it's not a comet but a colleague of mine just half a year ago wrote a review paper about um... a and he wrote an email to me saying I just finished a review about the comet and I told him what do you mean by the comet how can you call it a comet in a view paper.

 

I said we all know that it was not a comet and my colleague said well I have this theory that when we looked at it it didn't have a cometary tail.

 

But when we didn't look at it it had a cometary tail and I said well you know that's just like going to the zoo and looking at an elephant and arguing that it is a zebra but it shows its stripes When we look away.

 

How can that be the view of the mainstream that makes no sense.

 

So I feel sometimes like the child the kid in Hans Christian Anderson's folktail who said that the emperor has no clothes and in this case 'Oumuamua is the Emperor and the clothes are the cometary tail it's not a comet and everyone around me say no no no it's actually a comet but the com the cometary tail is invisible and there was actually a a nature paper just a couple of weeks ago talking about an invisible cometary tail and we showed that the paper had a mistake in a in terms of calculating the surface temperature we wrote a paper a day later about it but people are so eager to make it normal uh... to make it just a water Iceberg even though it didn't look like a typical Comet and uh...

 

It got to the point that we wrote this paper with my colleague showing that the nature paper has a mistake you know by a factor of a million they missed the term in the energy equation and when I pointed this out to reporters who just mentioned the nature paper a day earlier they said we don't want to add anything to our report because it will confuse our readers if we now say something is wrong with the nature paper and and I asked myself you know when we look at politics we often complain that police patients do not attend to evidence do not use rational thinking.

 

Yet even in the context of science you find mainstream journalists science reporters and as well as practitioners of science just trying to call an elephant a zebra one of the people that you have interviewed or you've been working with.

 

In the past was Professor Stephen Hawkings and in 2010 he made a a really interesting comment concerning uh... the Seti Project putting out radio Transmissions uh... looking looking for signs of extraterrestrial life and Professor Hawkins thought that this was a dangerous thing to do because hostile extraterrestrials might respond that.

 

He thought that extraterrestrials would be more advanced and that would be very similar to the conquistador as when they came to the new world and conquered the the Americas but very recently on in April uh... this year April 10, you wrote a paper where you believe that extra extraterrestrials offer benefits and are not an existential threat so why did you write that paper.

 

That's right, the Stephen Hawking visited my home for the Passover said there actually in April 2016 and that was a year and a half before 'Oumuamua was discovered I was not that much into the search for extraterrestrial technological objects near Earth at the time and so I didn't really confront him but after the past seven years when I was involved in in researching along uh... these lines.

 

I realized that I disagree with him because um... for a variety of reasons first of all uh... you know we have our Science and Technology just for the past Century or so quantum... mechanics was discovered exactly a century ago and all of our gadgets and electronics and internet and everything is based on what we learned about quantum... mechanics over the past Century.

 

But then most of the stars uh... formed billions of years before the sun the sun is a late bloomer so to speak and therefore if there were civilizations that developed technologies and science near other stars.

 

They did it billions of years before us and so they had not just one century but maybe millennia or millions of years or even billions of years of Science and Technology development. So they are likely much more advanced than we are.

 

It's very unlikely that they are at the same phase of our development and therefore you know for we would appear to them just like ants appear you know in the cracks of a pavement to a biker passing by.

 

I mean they do not not pause a threat in fact most bikers do not even pay attention to the ants and because they have some other objective for their trip their journey and so on the other hand for us it will be a great opportunity to learn about our technological future because we are currently for example developing a GPT 5 and the GPT4 already has a hundred trillion connections only a factor of six, shy of the number of synapses in human brain.

 

So we're getting to the point where AI systems will beeven more complex than the human brain and and therefore you know we might use them as astronauts in space we can send them and they will learn from experience and they will be more um... able to cope with the hazardous conditions of space with we can harden them.

 

The electronics so that they survive the cosmic rays are over there they will have patience to travel for millions of years across in between stars and so if we can imagine sending AI astronauts most likely uh... that's what we will see from other civilizations that are more advanced than we are and we can learn from their Technologies.

 

Just imagine finding iPhone 100 you know and pressing some buttons to figure out things that we've never imagined it may look like a miracle to us and in fact I do think that you know a very advanced scientific civilization is a good approximation to God...

 

What religious text talked about because it could probably produce life uh... and in the laboratory and may even be able to produce baby universes in the laboratory uh... you know if they understand how to unify quantum... mechanics and gravity one of the um... people who started to do work on categorizing extraterrestrial civilizations was that Dr Nikolai Kardashev who put out a paper in the early 1960s and his uh... scale in terms of different extraterrestrial civilizations in terms of energy consumption that would be a measurement of their level of civilizational development has been used in quoted ever since uh...

 

Professor Michio Kaku who I'm sure you you know has popularized that that idea so you know when we're looking at this idea that uh...

Stephen Hawking put out that some extraterrestrials may be hostile because of their advancement and of course your thesis that you know the level of advancement probably diminishes with the age of a civilization how useful is this uh... typology as we go further down this typology of type one two three four extraterrestrial civilizations can we expect type 3, type 4 being more friendly and type 1 or type 2 maybe maybe being more aggressive uh...

 

No, I mean this these categories are based on the amount of energy being harvested by the civilization so you know we at best uh... are currently are trying to harvest the sunlight and that is impinging on on the surface of Earth and of course one can imagine a civilization that goes beyond that and uses a Dyson Sphere to harvest the energy output of its star and then you can go even beyond that and imagine using all the energy output from all the stars in the galaxy but the way I categorize civilizations is differently um...

 

I think um... uh... you know the simplest civilization is just adapting to Nature the way nature is in terms of resources we were in that phase and then the the next phase would be to use the tools to reshape nature uh... and then environment and that's what we are doing since the Industrial Revolution but of course the Final Phase the most advanced phase is to recreate nature.

 

So in a way we are starting to do that with AI trying to recreate sentience you know where we have our first uh... alien baby that was just made that just created just born in our technological belly uh... our uh... this uh... you know and AI systems will become more and more similar to humans or better than humans on many tasks and um... and and of course there is a much higher level not just recreating intelligence but um... also recreating the entire universe in principle uh... you know if we ever understand how to unify quantum... mechanics and gravity we might engineer that knowledge and uh... try to make a baby Universe in the laboratory and maybe our universe was created that way by someone uh... in a lab with a white coat.

 

But the the other reason I'm not too worried about an encounter is because I believe in um... the fittest surviving in interstellar Space by the way we shouldn't worry about microbes the way that the indigenous tribes um... you know suffered medical disasters as a result of those viruses that the bacteria were brought by the European visitors just because the European visitors were biological uh...

 

I don't think that we are likely to encounter biology creatures we are most likely to encounter technological gadgets and they will not bring disease to Earth and moreover in terms of the fittest surviving.

 

I believe that the peace seeking civilizations are more likely to survive because the others the more aggressive ones um... you know they suffer in conflicts and may get eliminated they will not live very long.

 

So the ones that thrive the ones that reach a great distances are more slightly those that are not aggressive. That would be my sort of optimistic view on all of this and I should mention an anecdote.

 

You know we are investing every year two trillion dollars in military budgets worldwide and just imagine if our civilization decided to listen to John Lennon's words uh... imagine all the people living in peace and if we were to accept those words and use the surplus of two trillion dollars a year for the scientific mission of sending crafts to Interstellar space we could send a cubesat, a probe to every star in the Milky Way galaxy tens of billions of them by the end of this Century.

 

That much money per year can allow us within this Century to send a probe towards every Star and I say you know if we can do that someone else may have done that in the past billions of years and it takes less than half a billion years to Traverse the Milky Way galaxy.

 

The disc of stars with chemical propulsion so that the one that we are using right now so there was plenty of time for them to arrive to us and you know in the past 70 years the City Community was just searching for radio signals.

 

That's a very primitive technology also radio signals are you know they move at the speed of light if you are it's just like waiting for a phone call if nobody is calling you uh... at the time that you're waiting then you will not hear anything, whereas if you were to check your backyard for objects or your mailbox for any packages those can accumulate over time.

 

You don't need the sender to be alive when you're finding them and in fact the gravity of the Milky Way galaxy traps those packages any chemical rocket moves at a speed that is 10 times slower than the escape speed from the Milky Way galaxy.

 

So all these packages sent over the past billions of years by technological civilizations that may have predated us are still around and we can look for them.

 

I know you have created the Galileo project out of Harvard University so the website States the goal of the Galileo project is to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of extraterrestrial technological civilizations from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent validated and systemic scientific research so exactly what your text to signatures yeah so uh...

 

And it continues:

 

First I should explain that I wrote a book about called extraterrestrial I have a new book coming out in August 2023 that is called
the interstellar and after my book extraterrestrial came out it became a
bestseller it had 28 editions and three of them in Spanish uh... after it came out
I had about 2500 interviews over the past a couple of years and then a lot of
people came to my home to visit me and then among them some multi-billionaires
that decided to donate to my research account at Harvard University and that allowed me to establish to found that
together with Frank Loki and one of them um... CEO of Brooker to establish the
Galileo project and the idea is simple that uh... it's about time now for
um... a scientific research project uh... to search for uh... technological objects
that may have been manufactured by extraterrestrial civilizations near Earth I mean we know that we sent five
probes out of the solar system that's Voyager One Voyager two Pioneer 10
Pioneer 11 and New Horizons and they're making their way out of the solar system in 50 years over the past half a century
that's what we did but you know if we have more time we will send many more in the future and other civilizations may
have done that already so to me it makes complete sense rather than argue about the question
whether there are objects in near Earth to actually look for them uh... and that's
what the Galore project is doing in three um... different directions one is to date
the next tomorrow I find another object like it and this time around get much
better data because we have the web telescope and it's a million miles away from Earth so if we look from a
telescope on Earth and in the web telescope we can pinpoint the trajectory of such an object in three dimensions
very precisely and in Fair whether it has propulsion and
in addition there will be the Vera Rubin observatory in Chile within a year that
could identify many more objects like 'Oumuamua so that's one branch of the
Galileo project then considering in the next homework dating the next tomorrow
morning we have a dating app the Vera Rubin Observatory for that and then a
second branch has to do with Interstellar meteors of the type that I mentioned before and we are going on an
expedition to figure out whether it was artificial in origin uh... just because it
was tougher than all previous meteors that originated in the solar system and
that's the first one from Interstellar space so why should it be so unusual and
hopefully this summer summer 2023 uh... we will know what it was made of and
whether it was an artificial alloy so that's the second branch of the glove
project and the third one has to do with unidentified aerial phenomena that the US government talks about the Director
of National Intelligence that delivered two reports to the US Congress there is a new office error led by Sean
Kilpatrick and what we did within the Galleria project is assembled the first
Observatory dedicated to monitoring the entire Sky 24 7 in the infrared in the
optical in the radio and in audio and the data that we are getting about objects in the sky is fed to artificial
intelligence software where we are trying to classify the objects we see and all we need to do is decide whether
we see a natural object like a bird or a bug or we see a human-made object like a
balloon of the type that the US government shut down or maybe a drone or
an airplane and the key question is whether there is anything else and that's what we're
trying to find out by our suite of instruments and I should say that there
was never an astronomical Observatory suitable for the job because astronomers
are looking far away in a small field of view at distant objects if something
flies overhead they ignore it so we had to assemble a new type of Observatory
that never existed before with off-the-shelf components and the sky is
not classified the only reason the government classifies their data is because it was collected
by classified instruments classified sensors and they don't want adversaries to be aware of the US government
capabilities in that regard so the way I see it is the Galileo project is
complementing government because government is focused on National Security threats
and for me as a scientist it's boring uh... if we find anything that says made in
China I don't care much about it I'll be glad to deliver all that data to DC uh...
Washington uh... because anything human made is is not particularly exciting to
me uh... of course it's the day job of people in government to figure out those
things and if they shoot down balloons that's a blessing as far as I'm
concerned because they reduce the clutter in the sky and I have less noise
to worry about I'm just focused on the third category other is there anything
other there is even um... a funder of an observatory of the so we
are making copies of the first Observatory that is on Harvard University property and so we have two
copies in the making right now and one of them is funded uh... by a donor who said
that she is interested in words very much and so we will deliver an album... of
all the birds flying over overhead and because again I I don't care much about
birds and so um... what we care about is even if one of all the objects is uh... of
outside of this Earth from an extraterrestrial origin that that would be worth the entire Endeavor
um... you know that it's possible that almost all of the objects are from this Earth and I would not care about them so
that is the third branch of the Galileo project and we're currently collecting more data than was ever collected uh... on
unidentified area phenomena in the past because we have a dedicated scientific
Observatory that is looking at the sky 24 7. it's not anecdotal it's not someone pulling
an iPhone and looking at the sky at a given instant there are a lot of reports
but there are the data that exists out there is not trustworthy it's not of scientific quality so we are trying to
make it rigorous and careful and and analyze the data not by the human eye
but with artificial intelligence yes I think that's a very important um...
uh... issue is the scientific rigor that is applied to observations of UFOs and I
think that third branch is a critical one certainly one that I'm interested in and and I know the Galileo project uh...
website uh... distinguishes between accidental or anecdotal observations and
systemic science scientific research but you know is that a clean distinction I
mean to me I mean the these things can get very easily blurred you know when we're looking at some of the data
accumulated over the last 70 years concerning alleged UFO crashes I mean
there's a book that that came out uh... called Magic Eyes Only that's about uh... 10 years old now and it it examined it
presented data on 74 UFO crashes around the world dating from the late 1800s so
there's an abundance of data some of it as you say is anecdotal some of it concerns government Witnesses some of it
are images some of it are kind of like technical signatures so I mean when
we're trying to distinguish between us a purely scientific Enterprise systemic
research potential uh... anecdotal is there such a clear dividing line or or is it
really blurred and I wonder whether a book like this presents something that would be of scientific interest
well these are all intriguing reports and they motivate my interest in the
subject but they are not scientific quality data and I can explain that very simply uh... consider the soccer World Cup
in Qatar okay there were lots of people in the audience they had a lot of cell phones
they were all taking pictures of what happens in the field and then there was an event the question
is should we give a penalty or not what did FIFA do they didn't go to the
spectators and ask them for their cell phone cameras to figure out what really happened and whether penalty should be
awarded they didn't go to the players and ask them do you think there was a penalty
here or not what they did is use cameras that were fully under control looking at the field
with high resolution and letting the referee look at the video and decide
that's the difference between scientific evidence and Casual
anecdotal evidence and the worst type of evidence is human testimonies because we
all know that when there is a car accident and a number of people are involved each of them gives a different
report and how is it possible given the fact that it was the same event well it has
to do with human psychology it has bluish with with wishful thinking with not without not having a fully coherent
uh... sort of introspective view of what's going on and instruments are not like that if you
have full control over them and they are well calibrated you have a much better idea about what really happened so I'm
not saying the eyewitnesses are lying or they didn't really see something unusual I'm saying it's intriguing what they're
saying okay therefore I want to get high quality data but I cannot write a
scientific paper in physics based on what people tell me that is not
the scientific method the scientific method is relying on instruments that are well under not just the instruments
that you find on the street these are instruments that you calibrate you understand their response to things that
you you know just to give you an example suppose you want to figure out how luminous something is well you put a
light bulb in front of it and you know that how many watts are emitted by the light bulb you know the distance and
then you calibrate your instrument this way that's called calibration but if you
just see a bright source of light and you say I think it was really bright that's not really the scientific or if
Ukrainian astronomers say oh we see dark objects that are we believe there are 10
kilometers distance based on how dark they are relative to the sky which is pretty much what they did they didn't
have triangulation and they say well these objects move at 15 kilometers per second more than the Escape speed from
the earth and they look completely dark and when I saw that I said well
come on if they move that fast we know that objects moving that fast through the atmosphere should produce a fireball
now I say if you don't have good measurements of distance you can't argue
that they are at that distance moving at that speed because they could be 10 times closer to you and they could be
artillery shells over Ukraine okay so really the burden of proof when someone
claims there is no physics you can't just rely on crappy data what you need
to do is get Exquisite data such that you know for sure the distance because you did triangulation and you are 100
sure that you know how to uh... how far they were and then measure their speed
and so forth only then you can argue from new physics or something that is beyond what we understand uh... can I just
jum...p in there because you know your example of Qatar using uh... technical
photographic means of being able to adjudicate various decisions and how how that is now like the The Cutting Edge I
mean the the the issue I mean what what that shows is that for more than a century uh... the judgments of the umpires
were accurate enough so that such a system wasn't needed that the the soccer uh... profession uh... grew and and people
there was a consensus that this was that the judges were fair that they were accurate that their observations were
um... fairly accurate enough for the for the field to burgeon and and to grow and
so you know this makes me kind of like raise uh... the perspective that you know
what you have been describing is is very much a kind of bias from many uh...
astronomers or many of those in the physical sciences I mean I was trained as a political scientist so in the
social sciences we rely on human testimony you know we rely on people's observations and judgments of what's
happening around them and you know we we use various tools and methodologies to work out exactly what is more accurate
and maybe in a it's um... you know what you're arguing is like um... like bringing in scientific
instruments to help adjudicate you know what is a penalty what isn't a penalty what is offside what is an offside
whereas what I'm advocating is is that um... human judgment and observation pals
are accurate enough that for more than a century people can make the right calls and I think when it comes to UFOs it's
clearly not accurate it's clearly not accurate enough in politics because you see people on the two extremes claiming
the other side makes no sense whatsoever and using violence against each other meaning that one of them must be wrong
if one of them is right okay so you cannot argue that what humans are able to judge is reliable because you have in
politics opposite views using violence against each other so if one is right
the other is wrong and how can you judge how can you decide you see a lot of people being put in jail and then DNA
testing shows that they are innocent I would never rely on a human being in figuring out the truth about the
universe okay we have a lot of examples throughout human history where humans
made mistakes over and over again and it started at the time when they said that the Earth humans are at the center of
the universe that sounded so reasonable to people for a thousand years I'm not
talking about you for five minutes thinking this is right I'm talking about the entire Humanity for a thousand years
claiming that we are at the center of the universe and if you were to ask everyone they would say of course look
at the sun it moves around the Earth all the time of course and you would say of course human judgment says that and I
can look at the sky and I see the Sun moving around the earth and you would say for of course that is the right
thing and we should put Galileo in house arrest because he dares to say look through my telescope and you would see
data from an instrument that violates your conviction in okay and you would
say I don't care about instruments I know since the days of Aristotle for a
thousand years that we are at the center of the world and I will put Galileo in house arrest just because he wants me to
look through his telescope and use instruments to figure out the truth okay and that ended up being wrong
conclusively how do we know that because we send spacecraft that look at the Earth and the Sun from a distance and
the last one Orion shows the Earth as the Blue Marble moving around the Sun and yet you Michael Salla if you live
more than 400 years ago you would argue conclusively based on all your friends
and all your testimonies and all eyewitnesses and all philosophers prior
to you that the sun moves around the earth that's what you would argue that's
what you would put on social media and you would jump up and down when Galileo
was shut down because he was looking through his telescope so here I say that
what humans argue is irrelevant in science what we should use is data data
obtained by instruments that are well calibrated and look at the sky because we were proven wrong now not only in the
context of the Earth being at the center of the world and I'm repeating for a thousand years
people were sure about that not only in that case but now we know
that the Earth Sun System the Earth Sun system is not unique in fact somewhere
between three percent to a hundred percent of all the sun-like stars have a planet the size of the Earth
roughly the same separation meaning that life could have made could have formed on those planets and nothing is special
about our environment in fact what we see in our backyard is common this is not a matter of humans arguing among
themselves and deciding that that's the case it's a matter of looking through telescopes and seeing it in the sky
seeing it through the instruments through images taken by the instruments not by the people the instruments give
us this data so now we know the Earth Sun system is not unique so what do we
have left what we have left is humans arguing that we are the only
intelligence that ever existed ever existed since the Big Bang 13 so when
you ask me to rely on human judgment what most humans in Academia everywhere
you go you ask astronomers they might tell you I don't know I think actually it's quite possible that we are the only
intelligent species that ever existed so if I wanted to rely on uh... the convention
in Academia in science I would say there is nothing to look for it's a
self-fulfilling prophecy just like we are at the center of the universe the only thing that we can hang to right now is to say we are the only intelligent
species ever existed since the big back Albert Einstein was the smartest scientist who ever lived in the last
13.8 billion years that would be the convention these days that you want me to surrender to that you want me to
listen to because people say that and I say I don't care about what people say I
want to figure it out and if I see a technological object in my vicinity that
is coming through images that my telescopes are detecting that's no different than Galileo realizing the
Earth moves around the sun because I'm using instruments to figure out the truth I'm willing to surrender to
whatever data my instruments obtain not to have a Prejudice that's exactly the
point of doing science to be curious without prejudice not to listen to what people because there is a lot of chatter
always on social media among people and most of it is wrong well you know let me
just put it to you in this way I mean and the Galileo project is interested in extraterrestrial technological signatures now you know whether it's a
scientific pursuit or whether it's something that's appropriate to the social studies um... or political science Endeavor you're
looking at human observations and judgments if we'd like it take a third approach which is the intelligence
approach you know you're you're an intelligence analyst in you know whatever intelligence organization
around the world and your job is to search for extraterrestrial technological signatures you're going to look for uh... the scientific data which is
you have an abundance of that but as an intelligence analyst you would also be responsible for looking at well what are
the human sources of Intelligence on this you know have there been reports of these extraterrestrial technological
signatures have people come across crashed craft would we look at that so you know ultimately this comes down to
the question when we're looking at UFOs this third branch that the Galileo approach is is interested in you know
should we limit ourselves to a purely scientific perspective as you've outlined or should we take say the
approach of the intelligence Community which is looking at all of the sources of the data well let me offer you a
third possibility why don't you go and listen to people that are high on drugs or put goggles on their head okay these
people witness a virtual reality and they will tell you it's as real as the reality we live in because in their
goggles they see something why don't you listen to them why don't you go on a person that is high on recreational
drugs and tells you I really feel something about the quantum... universe and there is something moving faster than
light you know all these things are human made I don't care about what humans make up
that's not really the task that I have as a scientist my task is to figure out
the reality that we live in not the reality that you can see through goggles or through recreational drugs or through
hallucinations or wishful thinking or whatever you know that you see a lot in politics you see a lot in other
disciplines that's not really the the reality that I'm trying to figure out I'm trying to figure out the reality
that we all share out of which we build our gadgets out of
which we build our Technologies which serves us on a daily basis you know the
cell phone that we are all using is not a matter of human opinion I mean it was
developed as a result of understanding nature the reality that we share you
know at the quantum... level and that would not be possible if it was up to humans
and not instruments detecting that reality because nobody expected quantum... mechanics to be there nobody uh...
Michelson a very famous physicist at the end of the 19th century said you know
physics is almost over all we need to do now is figure out the constants of
nature to the fifth decimal point and he said that at the end of the 19th century then five years later Albert Einstein
realized oh actually you know uh... space and time are you know are completely
different than we thought before they are not absolute and then 15 years years later he realized that curvature of
space and time is gravity and then 25 years after Michael's son's speech in
Chicago the University of Chicago quantum... mechanics was discovered and we
realized that in fact what we think of reality is not really the reality that that we live in and all of these
Revelations came about after humans were sure that they understand you know not just humans physicists so how did it
come about it came about because of data that was obtained that convinced us that
indeed we don't fully understand and and right now there are lots of halls in our understanding for example we don't know
what most of the matter in the universe is we call it dark matter you know and then we don't know what happened before
the Big Bang what happens inside a black hole there are lots of things we don't know but the way to figure them out is
not to ask people the way to figure them out is by Consulting nature and the same is true
about one of the fundamental questions is that we have which is are we alone okay and to answer this question we
should not ask people we should look through our instruments and see if there is any evidence for any neighbor that we
have and and by the way this would give us a meaning to our life because Stephen Weinberg who won the Nobel Prize in
physics in his book the first three minutes in the at the end of the book he said The more comprehensible the
universe is the more pointless it looks and I say well it looks pointless if you
focus on particles and radiation that are that have no life like stars
galaxies but once we find a partner it will give a meaning to our existence
if you have time for one more question I would love to ask you about this paper that you just wrote Dr Sean Kirkpatrick
that some UFOs may be probes from an alien Mothership so could you just
explain why that hypothesis was put forth well this is discussed also in my
book extraterrestrial it's a possibility because when you have a big craft passing through the solar system it
makes a lot of sense to spread the small probes that will visit planets and the
many locations on a given Planet this was just mentioned in the introduction of the paper the paper focused on using
physics that what we understand about physics to constrain unidentified the
area phenomena that was the main purpose and it resulted from a visit that Sean kick Patrick
made to my home he was in the area and um... you know all together as I said I do
see the Galileo project as come complementary to the work of government well I want to thank you very much
Professor Loeb for coming on to exopolitics today and sharing your your research and insights into this whole
UFO extraterrestrial phenomenon thanks for having me
you have been listening to exopolitics today with Dr Michael Salla please
remember to like share and subscribe to this channel join or start a
conversation in the comments take the time to explore the vast library of best-selling books webinars and podcastsby Dr Sala visit exopoliticstoday.com
thank you