Are We the Indigenous Intelligent Species in Our Cosmic Neighborhood?

Below is a transcript of my interview with Jesse Weber on NewsNation last night. Jesse’s questions are marked with JW and my answers with AL. The video recording is available here.

JW: We at News Nation have been at the forefront in the fight for full transparency on life beyond Earth. And while the Pentagon is slowly releasing newly declassified UFO files, we have seen some wild headlines and claims surrounding aliens lately. First, there was whistleblower David Grush telling Joe Rogan he’s not only seen video of aliens at UFO crash sites, but described some of them as looking like Greek gods or gorilla lizards. One social media post claimed that Harvard professor and head of the UAP Science Advisory Council, Avi Loeb, thinks aliens could reveal themselves within the next 16 days. Buzzy, scary, great to share across the social media feed. How true is it? Turns out, not at all.

Avi Loeb is calling out the post in an article earlier today, calling that claim false, saying this does not accurately represent his views or scientific research. Avi Loeb, Harvard professor, an astrophysicist, head of the UAP Science Advisory Council, is joining us. Thank you so much for taking the time.

You read this, your reaction to it. Did they get like two theories combined? What happened here?

AL: Thanks for having me. It’s obvious that there are people who want to get attention by ascribing things that I don’t say. And in this case, they wanted to get clickbait. This post here got more than 120,000 views. That’s 10 times more than any other post from this particular account on X, where they just are trying to attract attention. They are welcome to do that, but not to misquote me. When they say something that is not true, that is a lie, that is actually quite dangerous, because some people may believe it.

JW: People believe that they saw the headline. They think aliens are coming in 16 days. Where did they get that from?

AL: Time in the universe is measured in units of billions of years. So, I would argue that if we do discover that we are being visited, and that could very well be the case, it has been going on for a while. These may be entities that visited the Earth before humans came along. The human species arrived only in the last tenth of a percent of the history of Earth. It’s quite possible that we are not the indigenous intelligent species, cosmologically speaking. In fact, if we disappear, nobody would mourn the death of our civilization and there will be no cosmic funeral.

It’s really our obligation to figure out who else lives in our cosmic neighborhood. And the way to do that is scientifically. Over the past week, I had two scientific papers, one from the Galileo Project where we measure distances to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) by looking at them from different directions. That is a very well demonstrated method by now and I am also planning a new observatory that will allow us to get high resolution images and also take a spectrum of UAP so that we would know their material composition. This is funded. This observatory is funded and will be located at the former residence of Carl Sagan in Ithaca, New York. All of this is within the Galileo Project. The second paper that appeared was about six dots in the sky that were reported in the latest tranche of UAP data from the Pentagon. Members of the UAP Science Advisory Council realized that these dots are flickering exactly at the rate that you would expect from birds flapping their wings. That’s the way science is done. We analyzed the video, we figured out these are birds, and we move on.

JW: And that’s the way to do it. Avi, you said it so well. That is exactly right. When we know what it is, we can put aside any other kind of speculation or theories.

While I have you on the program, I have to ask you. I just mentioned David Grusch’s claims to Joe Rogan about Greek gods, gorilla reptiles at UFO crash sites. Your reaction?

AL: The fundamental interesting question here is whether we are visited by alien craft that were manufactured by extraterrestrial civilizations. And if so, why would the biological pilots be similar to creatures here on Earth and be adapted to the environment that we live in? The only interpretation I can think of is that maybe our visitors use 3D printers to reproduce things that they find here on Earth, and these are a product of synthetic biology.

That is my immediate reaction. I find it hard to believe that these pilots made it through interstellar space and so the only way I can make sense of it is that these biological entities were produced here on Earth.

Ultimately, we have to see the evidence in order to believe it. It’s not sufficient for David Grusch to tell us what he thinks is out there. We have to see direct evidence. It’s possible that the U.S. government has materials from UAP crash sites, and so I am working hard to find it through the UAP Science Advisory Council that I’m leading. Obviously, if we get to something, there will be a public announcement about and the information will be shared through the White House.

JW: There was a true part in that post that you have a bet that the government will release information about extraterrestrial life by 2030. Is that true?

AL: The existence of the bet is true. If the government has such information, then yes, I think it will come to light, because right now, thanks to President Trump’s directive, we have a new mindset within the U.S. government. We have a chance of finding out whether we are being visited. So, stay tuned!

JW: I’m staying tuned. I’m here. You got an open platform to come on. Avi Loeb, I really appreciate you taking the time and also correcting the record about that piece of misinformation. Because when I read it, I thought aliens are coming here in 16 days. What’s going on? But we got you to set the record straight. Thank you so much. We appreciate you. Keep up the good work.

AL: Thanks for having me.

This morning, I have received the following sonnet from the poet Alan Wagstaff in New Zealand. Alan wrote:

“Dear Dr Loeb

I find deliberate disinformation, especially when it’s AI-tifized, more than annoying — it’s distressing.

Having read of your experiences with misinformation villains I had to write this sonnet. I hope you can connect to its theme.

Kind regards

Alan”

Authorized publication by Dr.Avi Loeb