Avi Loeb

Avi Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, the longest-serving chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy, and founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative, whose mainstream astrophysics credentials made his 2018 hypothesis that the interstellar object 'Oumuamua might be an artificial probe rather than a natural comet or asteroid a genuinely disruptive event within professional astronomy, drawing both intense public interest and significant pushback from colleagues who argued natural explanations, including unusual outgassing dynamics, remained more parsimonious. In 2021 Loeb founded the Galileo Project, an initiative explicitly committed to studying UAP and interstellar-object questions using standard, transparent scientific method and open data, deploying custom multi-sensor observatories to systematically image the sky and applying machine-learning classification to distinguish conventional objects from genuine anomalies, deliberately avoiding reliance on classified government sources or anecdotal testimony. Loeb has continued to court controversy, including a widely covered 2023 deep-sea expedition to recover spherules from a suspected 2014 interstellar meteor impact site, whose extraterrestrial-versus-terrestrial origin remains scientifically disputed. His prolific public writing, popular books, and willingness to advance speculative but falsifiable hypotheses have made him simultaneously one of the most publicly recognized and most professionally contested figures in the UAP-adjacent scientific community.