Why is Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb working with ardent UFO believers? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb working with ardent UFO believers?

science.org

54 pointstejohnso29 comments

"But others say Loeb is tarnishing astronomy and undermining the search for extraterrestrial intelligence"

I mean I think this is all nonsense but the idea someone doesn't have the correct credentials to produce scientific evidence is so distasteful.

We must first put on our properly powdered wig, dance the minuet, then and only then is one capable of collecting UFO evidence!

Credentials do matter to some extent or at least actually following the scientific method.

But overall there has been quite a big regression since SETI has pretty much failed to capture anything of even remote interest.

Loeb isn’t Sagan but the fact that you can’t even get funding for simple missions like looking for technological markers in the atmosphere of exoplanet does seem to indicate that there is a lot of stigma these days against anything related to searching for intelligent life.

Credentials can help filter out a lot of garbage. For example, some podcast bro spouts something about vaccines that goes against the prevailing wisdom, I'll mostly ignore it. If an ER doc from the University of Barbados says something, I'll probably give it some time and effort. If an immunologist from the mayo clinic says something, I'm going to really give it some serious thought and time researching it.

I wouldn't discount something purely on lack of prestige and education, but you have to be able to filter some based on credentials or you'll spend all your time fact checking things like whether the Sandy Hook school shooting was all faked or whether 9/11 was an inside job or if the government is using 5g to give us all COVID so they can use the vaccine to implant tracking chips in everyone.

Scientific credibility is a combination of the quality of your current paper as evaluated by peer review and replication, and the same for your previous work.

Notice the lack of "correct credentials" in my sentence.

Just a few decades ago it was the case the a majority of comets, asteroids, and supernovae were discovered by amateur astronomers -- and their work is taken very seriously by professionals. You can still report such discoveries no matter what credentials you have.

p.s. my hobby is dance history and I can dance the Minuet, hope that doesn't disqualify my opinion in your eyes.

Scientific credibility is called reproducibility. If it's not reproducible, it's not credible, and that's got nothing to do with individual scientists, or the quality of their previous work. Peer review, as she is practiced, is an unnecessary social affectation and an increasingly onerous barrier to progress.

Journals are rent extractors targeting the "science news" demographic. Curation is the justification for their involvement, but in practice it amounts to politicized gatekeeping for profit.

Real science communication looks like scihub - the firehose torrent in which the curation is done by individuals seeking information separate from any "proper" authority.

I am a research affiliate with the Galileo Project, and I just want to suggest to anyone who is skeptical about our goals to visit the website (https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home) in particular the ground rules and FAQ section to see by what means we are attempting to establish a methodology for rigorously addressing the question of ETC technology within our solar system. This is a question with many directions by which it can be addressed, and because there is little public data available we do not have priors that point to the notion that one direction is “more likely” than other directions. Thus, to be as rigorous as possible we are assessing as many possibilities as we can within budgetary constraints and standard scientific practices.

As for the notion of UFO/UAP flying around, for over 70 years in the United States there have been reports of unidentified aerial phenomenon, with reports of various degrees of quality and provenance. In the 1940s there was a general public acceptance that UFOs represented physical objects, but confidence and reporting towards that idea fell off quickly. I will not get into the nuance of the public discourse on UFOs in America - but it is safe to say that it is one of the more interesting historys of science. In the last 5 years there has been an absolute tidal shift in government and academic interest in this topic, mainly fueled by recent admissions by the department of defense of the reality of UAP confirmed by multiple sensor systems. Within the project, we do not have definitive beliefs about the nature of UAP and instead simply seek to corroborate the data.

The team is a wonderful array of multi-disciplinary scientists from all walks of life and with credentials which are akin to that of any major scientific endeavor. I urge you to investigate why so many people are interested in this question, and to dispel any preconceived notions of what is “possible” within the context of science. Truth is objective, and so is data - only time will tell if this whole thing was simply a misdirection or a dead end, but we should appreciate that it is still possible to ask hard questions about the world we live in today and to receive funding to answer those questions.

Yeah, the idea of Oumuamua as space junk is faintly plausible simply because not enough data is present to determine what it really was. And if somewhat-above-human level technological societies existed, they'd send out probes that would spend 99.9999% of their time as space junk so this might well the only evidence of alien life humans will ever see.[1]

But jumping from there to earth-based UFO is a serious mistake, since virtually all of these have been debunked and their claimed existence generally violates most basic laws of physics.

[1] This is just assuming nothing more than somewhat-above-our-level tech exists. And everyone assuming dramatic aliens essentially has assume things absolute impossible for our present tech. And maybe these things are just absolutely impossible.

Right, it's plausible but I think most of the plausibility it due to the data being very sparse. Like how a blurry video of a figure is plausibly Bigfoot.

Why is it such a serious mistake to attempt to collect data? I don't understand all the hate for a plausible hypothesis. He is not putting his fingers in his ears and yelling there are UFOs over and over, he is starting a project to collect data for a plausible hypothesis.

Most expensive, shared instruments give out observing time according to a scientifically-evaluated proposal.

He's starting a project by raising money from wealthy UFO believers.

Makes sense and sounds logical to me. Hopefully he sticks to his guns and doesn't allow the sources of the funding taint data collection or conclusions from data collection.

Well, given all the bridges he's burned at work -- I work there, btw -- it'll be interesting if he can successfully avoid being tainted.

> virtually all of these have been debunked

I don't know if you're aware but a lot has changed in the past few years. I used to dismiss is all as whacko sci-fi until last year, but the government is now confirming the reality of unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP a.k.a. UFOs). You should check out the report to Congress last year which detailed 140 incidents, 139 of which could not be explained prosaically, 80 of which were confirmed by eyewitnesses and multiple sensors, and 21 in which "observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics".

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/27/politics/ufos-uap-extraterres...

These are highly credible reports from the highest levels of military. Check out David Fravor's "Tic Tac" account off the coast of San Diego to get a taste of what's going on.

I've been curating this YouTube playlist of credible sources (including David Fravor) confirming the reality of these things if you'd like to learn more:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7gMGIbRUmhTRTuUHX8CA7H_s...

I think it's likely that most of the tic-tac things were some kind of projected image. It's the easiest way to explain the non-inertial movement of the object, and the bubbling ocean underneath: that was the projector station, possibly one of many.

David Fravor, while I believe he is credible, doesn't seem to be really giving the full picture. I think he's being careful in what he says for a reason. I think this is some kind of developing military technology, most governments probably have a vague idea of how it works and who is doing it but maybe they are not certain. A huge red flag is how non-chalant Fravor is about the whole ordeal. Even if you're not initially a UFO-hunter, I would think that such an experience would make any sane person start taking the possibility of aliens on earth more seriously. Because this didn't happen, I have to believe that Fravor has some additional information making him think this phenomena has a terrestrial source.

Someone with a more conspiratorial outlook might say that this is controlled disclosure, possibly intended to distract from more mundane Earthly political issues.

Have you watched Fravor's interview on Lex Fridman? As I recall he says he thinks it must be extraterrestrial. I wouldn't say he's being non-chalant about it.

Regarding the projection theory, it would have to be decades old tech since these sightings have been taking place for decades (not just hearsay, officially documented reports from credible sources). Many of these sightings occur around sensitive military areas, especially nuclear facilities, including an incident in the 60s where a UFO hovered over several missile silos, disabling the weapons one by one in the process.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-dea...

I used to think more like you, assuming it was either crackpot conspiracy theories or actual government conspiracies (projection, etc. like you said). But I've changed my opinion on it since last year. If you haven't taken a look at this stuff recently you should really check out the YouTube playlist I shared above. There's definitely something going on, and debunking it is requiring more and more conspiratorial thinking by the day.

I did watch Fravor's interview; this is mostly what I'm basing my thoughts on. He does say he thinks it's extraterrestrial, but goes on to say that he 'doesn't really care about things like that' and he just decided to drop it, or something. Isn't that kind of being nonchalant?

I'm not trying to be overly argumentative here - I want to believe, as they say. I was just left a bit disappointed by Fravor's testimony.

Re: being decades old, I think that's easily within the realm of my theory. Basically my theory requires a few precision servos with lasers to align them and some kind of maybe visual targeting system. This has certainly existed for at least 2 decades, probably 4 decades.

Let's say someone was testing an analog, remote-projection system using lasers in the 60s. Is it possible that this system heated up the mechanisms controlling the nukes enough to temporarily de-activate them?

But no, I haven't watched most of the videos in your Youtube playlist. I am actually interested and I will check them out.

> I think it's likely that most of the tic-tac things were some kind of projected image.

A projected image that is perfectly represented in three dimensions, viewable from multiple angles simultaneously, and giving off appropriate radar signatures to match its position in real time? That in itself would be something quite astonishing, and would certainly be a matter of national security.

It's pretty fuzzy in the clips I've seen, so I think it depends what you mean by perfectly represented. A coordinated set of lasers can cause a single point to appear to emit from multiple angles simultaneously.

Re: radar, I was not aware of evidence that the radar signature of the device is known to match the appearance of the device in real-time. Where do you get this?

My understanding is that some radar stations picked up 'something moving at high velocity' in some area, and the jet fighters went in for a visual. There may be only a very loose correspondence between radar tracking and visual tracking. It would be much easier to evaluate if they released the numerical data, which the navy no doubt has.

We have video from the government that is matched with eye-witness testimony from David Fravor, a pilot who taught at the Navy's Top Gun school. I'm not suggesting this is iron-clad evidence of anything, but nothing about this incident (and others) has been "debunked". The first-hand account of one of the Navy's most accredited naval aviators along with matching video and sensor data more credible than some random person on Youtube who "debunks" it by saying it was the moon. If the evidence points to a phenomenon that doesn't operate inside the laws of physics as we understand them, then we have to adjust our understanding. Perhaps there are very good, mundane explanations for this and another incidents, but its foolish to simply ignore or downplay the significance of things we can't understand.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52457805

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB8zcAttP1E

In general, I think a large part of academia is basically "toe the line or get out". And I've worked in academia for 28 years.

This piece reads like a celebrity drama article. It's so much back and forth between Loeb and his detractors, plus fitting in plenty of colorful emotions like "his anger boiled over..." Not much intellectual stimulation here.

Why shouldn't he? There are multiple credible reports of UFO's demonstrating interesting or unknown capabilities. Someone should be investigating this stuff.

UFO believers? They believe that its... unidentified?

Sure, why not? There are those that dismiss all sightings as aberrations and lies and don't believe there are actual objects that are flying around our atmosphere. Then there are people that believe there are actual objects that are flying around but don't know wtf they are.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I think you're misrepresenting the first group.

What does requiring extraordinary evidence have to do with there being two different buckets of people, those that believe in there being actual unknown objects and those that don't believe there are actual unknown objects flying around? Or how am I misrepresenting them? To be skeptical and not believe in them seems logical to me as does believing there is some weird unknown (from the standpoint of the US government) crap flying around (the david fravor interviews and the videos released by the pentagon are definitely something that made me go from no friggin way do they exist to making me pause and go wtf.. i guess its plausible that their is weird unknown stuff flying around).

I would hope that anyone rational would accept that based upon the evidence to date and our current knowledge of astronomy and physics, extra-terrestrial visitation is possible, but very unlikely. Thus it becomes a case of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". But instead, all we have is blurry, shaky footage. Or some phenomena such as lens flare. And the claim that "what 'they' are doing is impossible according to our physics, so it must be extraterrestrial." So much willing misinterpretation and jumping to an unsupported conclusion.

Now, efforts like that described in the article to obtain more evidence would usually be good, but you can't prove a negative, and no amount of undetected aliens, or explained and discarded "evidence" will convince the true believers that ufos are not real aliens.

My point was that the wording is rather bizarre, it sounds as if the term 'UFO' is being equated with 'definitely probably aliens' instead of 'Unidentified Flying Object'

For example: I believe in UFOs, there's no way we have positively identified very last thing flying through our atmosphere. That doesn't mean I think they're living extraterrestrial visitors though

Loeb is rapidly dissipating the reputational credit he still has. I expect him to become a regular on Ancient Astronauts soon.

Academic reputation is properly based on original hard work. Idle speculation is the opposite of that. It is fine for me to suggest that pre-dynastic Egyptian stone dishware is evidence of an unknown technological efflorescence, because who cares? It doesn't matter if I'm right, though it would be cool if I was. But I am not doing the work, and nobody expects me to, so if it gets done, somebody else will deserve and get the credit.

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