Astrophysicist Avi Loeb of Harvard and Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick of the Pentagon have co-authored a new paper on UFOs.
The paper, currently undergoing peer review, is titled “Physical Constraints On Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” and looks at the alleged movements and capabilities of unexplained objects seen by US Navy pilots off the US coast.
The pair of scientists are certainly not new to the field of UFO research. Avi Loeb is an astrophysicist who has been active in the search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, and Dr. Kirkpatrick is the director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).
In a new article, experts claim that the supposed capabilities of these “highly maneuverable” objects are so great that, due to strong friction, they should have generate a visible fireball and a corresponding radio signature visible via radar.
The fact that these effects were not present at the time of the observations suggests that either these objects violated the laws of physics in some way, or the data on such encounters may not be entirely accurate.
“The lack of all these signatures could imply inaccurate distance measurements (and hence derived velocity) for single site sensors,” the paper concludes.
In other words, a number of UAP sightings might be able to be explained away by optical illusions or the limitations of certain equipment. Indeed, in Congressional hearings last year Defense officials demonstrated how night vision googles used with camera lenses could make an out-of-focus drone appear as a more intriguing blurry triangular object.
But Loeb is arguably more of a believer than a debunker.
In his 2021 book “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” he makes the argument that the first interstellar object detected in our solar system was likely an artificial probe of some sort sent by an extraterrestrial intelligence from elsewhere in the cosmos.