Pentagon officials testified today in a rare congressional hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), colloquially referred to as UFOs. Avi Loeb, the Frank B Baird, Jr. professor of science at Harvard University, joined Closing Bell to discuss the ongoing hearings. Typically a subject that the government avoids, Congress is now publicly exploring the long obscured issue given that UFO interactions could potentially be a national security threat. The renewed discussion opens up an opportunity for a new partnership between the U.S. government and the scientific community to collaborate on research.

Closing Bell

UFOs Are Potential Security Threats According to U.S. Lawmakers 	

Welcome back to closing bell on cheddar news. Everyone in a house hearing today. Key lawmakers warning that we face a threat from above a hearing held by the House intelligence subcommittee concluded that UFOs must be investigated and taken seriously as a potential national security issue. Take a look unidentified aerial phenomena or a potential national security threat. And they need to be treated that way for too long. The stigma associated with you a PS has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis, pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did. D. O. D. Officials relegated the issue to the backroom or swept it under the rug. Entirely fearful of a skeptical national security community today, we know better. You. A. P. S are unexplained. It's true, but they are real. They need to be investigated and many threats they poles need to be mitigated. All right. Today's hearing was the first public congressional hearing about UFOs in decades. Lawmakers and intelligence officials not so much worried about aliens. Mom, Mom. But whether an adversary like Russia or china might be testing next generation technology in american airspace. But some say these hearings are a good step forward for the scientific community that is studying UFOs and joining us now, Avi Loeb frank, B baird Jr, professor of science at Harvard University bobby. Thanks so much for being here for this story. What are your biggest takeaways from today's hearing and what exactly were you expecting? It's interesting to hear about the stigma surrounding these aircraft. Well, thanks for having me. Indeed, the biggest news is that now we discuss this subject seriously. There are objects in the sky and the government doesn't know what their nature is. And of course you can think of two possible explanations. Either they belong to other nations that are developing technologies that we are not aware of or there are natural in origin some unusual phenomenon in nature. But in both cases we can figure it out with better data. And of course the Congress is interested in any national security threat. I'm more interested from a scientific perspective in another category which I call other. And if it doesn't, if even one object does not belong to either the category of being human made or a naturally in our atmosphere. You know that would be very intriguing because it may signal that there is a smarter kid on our cosmic block. Yeah, I wanna talk with you more about that other category and that significant kid on our cosmic block. I would love that. Um but I do want to talk about the significance of this. Why is it so important that um this congressional hearing is happening And right now, Yes, so for many decades this subject suffered from stigma and now we have instruments that collect high quality data. There are so many reports from military personnel that the government cannot ignore it. But of course Congress is interested in it from the point of view of the safety of the military personnel, the security of the United States. But it cannot avoid seeing the data that comes through the very sophisticated sensors that the government has at its disposal. And the government is putting a lot of money into missile warning system that monitor the sky. So it cannot avoid but finding unusual objects. And the question is, what are they? And I think it's one of these unusual situations where scientists can help the government figure it out and should do so because the public is very curious. Obviously the intelligence agencies would prefer not to admit that they can't figure out if this is a matter of national security. It seems to me that they cannot really explain some of these objects in terms of human made technologies. And so they are curious to find out what these are. And since these objects appear routinely, you know, we can in principle build telescopes, systems that will monitor the sky and figure out what these objects are. And that's what I established as the Galileo project. We're actually putting together the first telescope system on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory in the coming weeks. Yeah. And you understand, I think as you mentioned the topic of safety, why government agencies wouldn't necessarily communicate all of these updates or these findings with the public. But why do you think there has been a lack of communication with the scientific community which to your point could potentially help to discover what some of these unidentified objects are. Well, I think it's the fault of academia, the subject is ridiculed and dismissed. However, I think it belongs to the mainstream of academia. You know for a century now we are searching for what most of the matter in the universe is. We call it dark matter, we don't know what it is. We invested billions of dollars in the search for dark matter. We haven't found it and that's part of the mainstream of science. My point is the possible existence of equipment from other civilizations is not a speculative idea. We send equipment to space that will exit the solar system. We know that half of the sun like stars have a planet the size of the earth, roughly the same separation and most stars formed billions of years before the sun. So all we need to do is look out and search and see if there is any equipment from another civilization near us and we haven't allocated the resources for that. And part of it is psychological. We prefer to think that we are unique and special and we are the smartest civilization that ever existed since the Big Bang. I would argue that it's very unlikely. Let's be modest and look out and I think this excites the public now the government talks about it. Seriously. There is no way out but to address this question. So are you confirming that you believe the likelihood of another as you put it cosmic kid on the block is out there? Well, I became interested a few years ago when the first two interstellar objects objects that came from outside the solar system looked weird. The first one reported was in 2017. It was given the name O Mua Mua and I wrote a book about it. Extraterrestrial. It had many anomalies that made it different from the rocks we had seen before in the solar system. It didn't look like a comet, not like an asteroid. And then We realized that in 2014 there was a meteor from outside the solar system that collided with earth and that meteor was tougher than iron. So again, a very unusual objects. So we plan to actually do an expert expedition in the coming months to collect the fragments of this meteor from the ocean floor near Papua new guinea and figure out what it was made of and maybe we could tell whether it was artificial or natural in origin. Alright, Avi Loeb frank, B baird Jr, professor of science at Harvard University. So good to have you on the show