Esoteric thinkerAvi Loeb (b. 1962)

Born Beit Hanan, Israel, 1962. PhD plasma physics, Hebrew University, 1986. Long-form Five Year Plan member at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study under John Bahcall. Joined Harvard 1993; tenured 1997; Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science (one of the senior chairs in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences). Chaired the Department of Astronomy 2011-2020 (a nine-year stretch, unusually long for the position). Founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative (the first multi-disciplinary center for black hole research, founded 2016). Author of over 700 peer-reviewed papers in cosmology, astrophysics, and the physics of black holes; co-authored textbooks on first-galaxy formation and on the early universe.

The pivot toward UAP discourse came after the October 2017 discovery of 1I/’Oumuamua by Pan-STARRS — the first confirmed interstellar object passing through the solar system. ‘Oumuamua had several anomalous properties: an extreme axis-ratio shape (length-to-width estimated 6:1 or greater, exceeding any known natural body), non-gravitational acceleration on departure from the sun (consistent with cometary outgassing in mass-loss balance, but no cometary tail was detected in observation), and an albedo and color suggesting metallic-or-organic surface. Loeb and his Harvard postdoc Shmuel Bialy published “Could Solar Radiation Pressure Explain ‘Oumuamua’s Peculiar Acceleration?” (Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2018) considering the lightsail hypothesis — that the object could be a discarded artificial solar-sail of non-human origin. The paper is technical and conditional; Extraterrestrial (HMH, 2021) presented the broader case to general audience.

In July 2021 Loeb co-founded the Galileo Project (with Stanford’s Garry Nolan among collaborators), a privately-funded systematic observational program for UAP and interstellar-object detection, headquartered at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The Project operates instrumented observatories (the first at the Harvard college observatory, additional sites planned) with all-sky cameras, infrared imaging, and radio monitoring; its mandate is to collect open-data UAP observations under transparent peer-reviewable methodology. Loeb’s June 2023 expedition to retrieve fragments of the 8 January 2014 CNEOS-1 (IM1) interstellar bolide from the seafloor off Papua New Guinea recovered spherules of contested interstellar versus terrestrial-contamination origin; analysis is ongoing. He has testified to congressional UAP staff briefings and is the most senior credentialed academic openly engaged in UAP study.