Analysis of the Second Batch of UFO Files Released by the Pentagon

(Image credit: DW News)

The U.S. Department of War has released here two batches of files on Unidentified Objects (UFO/UAP). These are objects that the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies cannot identify. Below is a transcript of the latest interview I had last night with Deutsche Welle (DW) News, Germany’s international public broadcaster, available in video form here. DW’s comments and questions are marked with DW and my answers are marked with AL.

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DW: Look closely. What you’re seeing here is an unidentified airborne object filmed by a U.S. military drone over Syria in 2021. Just released by the Pentagon. It suddenly accelerates and vanishes like something out of science fiction. As if it just went into warp speed.

Except this isn’t science fiction. It’s real military footage, part of a second batch of declassified U.S. government files released by the Pentagon yesterday. 51 videos, 7 audio recordings, and previously unseen written accounts. We’re going to go through what’s in this release and what, if anything, it may actually prove. And we’re doing that with Avi Loeb. He’s an astrophysicist and professor of science at Harvard University and leader of the Galileo Project. That’s Harvard’s dedicated research program for detecting signs of extraterrestrial technology.

Avi, thanks for joining me.

AL: Thanks for having me. It’s a great pleasure.

DW: So, Avi, what do you make of this video of what seems to be this object going into warp speed out of nowhere? What’s special about this or why could the US military not identify this object?

AL: What is unusual about the object is that it accelerates very rapidly. Usually, drones move at a relatively steady speed. We don’t know the distance to this object and the value of the acceleration but the fact that it’s capable of moving so fast instantly makes it unusual and it is potentially technology that could have been developed by an adversarial nation. So, I would argue that if the US intelligence agencies and the Pentagon are not familiar with the kind of motion that it exhibits, at the very least it poses a national security threat because apparently someone else on Earth was capable of developing such an object. This raises questions about what the U.S. intelligence knows and doesn’t know.

DW: You say someone else on Earth is capable of developing this. You specialize in the theory of extraterrestrial technologies. So, what makes you so certain that this is not one of them?

AL: Well, it could be but first we have to consider the down-to-Earth possibility that it is produced by humans. If we had the knowledge of the actual distance to the object, we could have assessed its acceleration and then whether it’s human-made or not. But without that information, we have to allow for the simplest interpretation that it is a human-made technology.

I am leading the Galileo project at Harvard University. We recently established an observatory in Las Vegas where one unit is on top of Sphere — an entertainment center 100 meters in size, and we have two other units 10 kilometers away from it, that allow us to triangulate by looking at a given object from different directions and inferring its distance, velocity and acceleration. So, if we had an image of the unidentified object from another direction, we could immediately tell whether its acceleration is unusual or not. And it could be an outlier that represents technologies beyond this Earth — in which case, it would constitute the most important discovery ever made by humanity. But before we reach that conclusion, we need to know its actual distance.

DW: You have been watching these Pentagon releases closely. Is there anything in the first batch which came out earlier this month or the second one that came out yesterday that really surprised you or made you think that this is potentially a big discovery?

AL: I was not familiar with all of this data in terms of images, videos, and documents dating all the way back to 1946. What is clear to me is that throughout recent decades, this subject was discussed extensively among military personnel, intelligence officers, people within the Pentagon and potentially also high-level politicians within the U.S. government. All of them are serious people that often decide on matters of life and death and they all seem to take it seriously. So, it’s definitely a serious matter. There are two possible interpretations for the subset of these objects which are quite unusual. One is that the defense system of the US has some holes in it, because it finds objects that it cannot recognize. And the second is that we are dealing with a major scientific discovery.

Why would the U.S. government be the first one to notice it? The 2026 U.S. defense budget is close to a trillion dollars, more than a third of the worldwide military expenses. It’s about a hundred times more than the national science budget. Moreover, astronomers are focusing their telescopes on small portions of the sky at any given time. So, if there are rare objects that appear every now and then, astronomers would just ignore them if they are close to Earth, whereas the U.S. government would monitor them because of national security concerns. So, the U.S. government would be the first to notice them.

There are also reports about materials from crash sites and potentially also biological pilots that were aired through testimonies under oath to the U.S. Congress by people who used to work in government and I don’t know if there is anything behind them, whether they’re real or not. But the more information we get in these releases, the more I feel like a kid in a candy store, because science is all about the evidence and if we see unusual evidence we should pay attention to it and help the government figure it out.

What I don’t like is the response from the mainstream of the scientific community which is supposed to be curious but is not. It’s dismissive. It doesn’t take it seriously and that is inappropriate given the fact that this data was collected by reliable people.

DW: Right. We’re going to be looking at a few more of these videos. The Pentagon says it can’t identify the flying objects in these dozens of videos, but at the same time saying that there’s no evidence that they’re extraterrestrial. You have a reputation in the scientific community for being more open to extraterrestrial interpretations than others. Other scientists say: “Well, you know, this could be an unidentified drone in one case, or it could be some sort of a visual effect that we haven’t explained. What do you make of the Pentagon saying there’s no evidence that these are extraterrestrial?

AL: What I say is that their data is not good enough. There are two ways to approach it. One is to see all the data that the U.S. government has. It could include, for example, satellite data which potentially has a resolution of a few centimeters on the ground and can tell us very clearly if an object looks different from human-made technologies or moves differently. We don’t have access to such data because the sensors are classified. I don’t know whether such data shows unusual objects. But the second point is we don’t need to rely on the U.S. government. We can simply look up for such objects.

I’m intrigued by the reports. Some of the information is redacted and all the data was obtained in ways that are not scientific. I do think it’s the obligation of scientists to pay attention to anomalies, especially if they are reported by reliable authorities. At the very least, my time is not wasted because I’m contributing to the national defense of the U.S.; I’m helping my government figure things out. If I do end up getting firm evidence for an extraterrestrial origin, it would change the future of humanity. It’s an amazing discovery to make because it could inspire new science, new technology. It would imply that we are probably not at the top of the food chain, cosmologically speaking, and it will have religious and philosophical implications. It’s completely inappropriate for scientists to ignore these reports.

If you look at the history of science, there are many incidents when the main mainstream dismissed ideas that ended up being correct, including — in the case of Germany, continental drift which was suggested by Alfred Wegener, who was not a geologist, in 1912 and took 40 years for the mainstream community of geologists to accept his idea. Wegener passed away by the time his correct suggestion was accepted. There are many such cases and there are also cases of the mainstream of science going in the wrong direction. Most recently, the physics community was advocating for a new symmetry of nature: Supersymmetry. Ten billion dollars were invested in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, in part to search for this symmetry. We did not find it. So, it’s not always true that the mainstream knows what it’s talking about.

I think that we all should all be curious. That’s the way science makes progress by being curious about unusual phenomena, anomalies that perhaps flag new knowledge that we currently do not possess.

DW: Well, Avi, I’m very curious to see what you will say about this next clip that we can play. This one is said to show multiple objects in formation over water near Iran. It was filmed in 2022. We have to pay special attention to the bottom left corner of the screen. Another object enters the frame then disappears. Again, this is another of these videos of objects that the U.S. military says it cannot explain. The White House actually posted this video clip on social media when the release went out. It made it one of their chosen highlights. Why do you think they picked this video?

AL: Because some of the objects are not only moving in air, they are also going into the water and they do not seem to be slowed down as much as you expect from our known technologies. And there are claims that data collected on objects underwater indicate very large speeds, very massive objects moving. This is an example of a video that they could have released. But there are many other data sets that they did not release that indicate objects moving between air and water and not behaving in the way that we expect. Water is very dense, a thousand times denser than air, and you would expect much more friction as an object goes into water.

These are phenomena that are not easily explained. Of course, the data is not good enough. We know the speed of the boats in this case, so we can tell the object is fast, but I think the intriguing fact is the way it interacts with water.

DW: Could these objects not just be Iranian drones or drone boats or surveillance assets, even friendly assets? Wouldn’t that be the easier explanation?

AL: Yes, they could be. But what the Pentagon is saying is that it is not familiar with this kind of object. And what it may mean is that the U.S. needs to update what it knows about other nations in terms of technologies they possess. We know about the Chinese spy balloon that was shut down in 2023 and represented a surprise. There must be a lot of such balloons floating around the US by adversarial nations.

I should say there are also mundane explanations to what astronauts were reporting in the released files. For example, Buzz Aldrin reported seeing flashes and these may be a result of Cherenkov radiation which is emitted when fast-moving charged particles move faster than light in a medium like water and emit blue light. His eyeballs may have detected cosmic-rays which have an intensity 200 times larger than on Earth when you travel to the Moon. There were also photographs from the Moon that show lights above the surface of the Moon. I found that the same lights appear in parts of the film that were not exposed to the lens of the camera. So, to me that indicates again cosmic-rays. There are also “snowflakes” reported by Scott Carpenter, an astronaut on the Aurora 7 (Mercury-Atlas 7) spacecraft, that are frost from the cooling system of the capsule that he was in. These are all conventional explanations. But even if one in a million objects that we look at is not from this Earth — that would be the biggest discovery ever made by humanity.

DW: Let’s look at another video of an object that very clearly seems to be of this Earth. It actually looks a lot like a balloon. This was shot over Lake Huron in 2023. It shows a US fighter jet shooting down something that looks a lot like a balloon. We know it was shot down right after the case of the Chinese spy balloon. President Biden ordered this object to be shot down. I’m wondering: is there some great mystery here or more than meets the eye to you?

AL: No, I think this is a very simple case. There is nothing mysterious about it. They could have collected the parts of the balloon. I wonder why they would release it now. It was shut down just like the Chinese spy balloon. This balloon was launched by local citizens rather than the Chinese and there is nothing mysterious about it. So obviously what the Pentagon released is a mixed bag. They don’t give us the interpretation of each object and many of these objects are indeed simple to understand. We shouldn’t get excited about each and every video.

But all in all, there are lots of interesting documents. For example, there is a report about an intelligence officer who went on a helicopter mission to figure out an unidentified object and saw an unidentified object that behaves in really strange ways. I should also say that clusters of objects could be drones because we know that there are swarms of drones that were used, for example, by the Iranians last year. At the very least, some of these objects are definitely related to human-made activities but it’s not clear that all of them are because we don’t have enough information.

DW: You talk about accounts by people. It’s not just videos that have been released. One document that got a lot of attention yesterday was not a video at all. It was a written account from a senior U.S. intelligence officer. It’s someone who’s still serving, still has full clearances. It’s not a whistleblower um or anyone like that. It is describing a helicopter mission, maybe what you were referring to. He wrote, “In the distance, we saw countless orange orbs swarming in all directions against the backdrop of the mountain. The display lasted several minutes before fading. We were virtually speechless after these observations.” What do you make of this account?

AL: A swarm of orbs might be just a swarm of drones. The Chinese have beautiful displays of thousands of drones moving together. The U.S. also has that. So, collective motions of a lot of objects could definitely be drones. In order for an object to be unusual or an outlier, we need to have an assessment of its speed being beyond the performance envelope of human-made technologies and that data is not provided in these cases.

DW: There’s another aspect I want to bring up here which is that most of these cases that are released cluster around certain regions. We can actually look on a map at where in the world these cases come from that were released by the Pentagon. You can see by far the largest cluster comes from the Middle East, namely from Iraq, Iran, Syria, the UAE, the Persian Gulf. Is there an explanation for this geographic concentration?

AL: Yes, there is a very simple explanation for that. The more sensors and eyes you have on the sky, the more likely you are to find something that you cannot explain. The Middle East is a region full of conflicts. We see a lot of clustering close to Iran, for example, where there was a war just recently. Those regions where there are lots of sensors looking at the sky are also regions where you would expect military equipment to be deployed and so that’s another source for unusual objects.

There is often a misconception that all you need to do in science is to detect a signal. That’s not true. What you need is to demonstrate that the signal is statistically significant relative to the noise. In any war zone there is a lot of noise, meaning objects that are being deployed for military purposes. And if you do see a signal of some unusual objects in a war zone, most likely it involves objects that you are not familiar with being deployed by other nations. It is obviously the task of the intelligence agencies to figure out what these are. And what the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon are telling us is that they’re not doing their job. Because if they knew what these objects are, which is their job, they wouldn’t tell us about them. They would immediately identify them. These would not be unidentified anomalous phenomena. So, I would argue that these concentrations in regions of conflict imply that the U.S. has some holes in its intelligence and therefore cannot identify such objects.

Of course, believers in UFOs or UAPs would argue: “The aliens are interested in those regions because they’re trying to save us from ourselves or they want to monitor what’s happening.” I don’t think that is likely. I think it’s most likely related to human-made devices, which obviously not everyone knows about. There are many more sensors looking at the sky in these regions so that we can see more unidentified objects there.

DW: I just want to pick up on something you said. You mentioned UAP. This is the term also used by the Pentagon. They don’t talk about UFOs — the term that I grew up hearing about. UAP stands for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Is there a difference between UFOs and UAP?

AL: No. The definition of phenomena is more general because it can refer to objects that go into the ocean and not just air. Originally these were classified as unidentified flying objects and that was the idea of a UFO. Also, this term got a stigma of not being a serious matter. People ignored it with ridicule and about five years ago they wanted to bring some more respect to the discussion by calling these objects UAPs and also extending the unidentified objects beyond aerial objects to objects that go into water and maybe space as well. Altogether we’re talking about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, UAP, which is the more general term. But the substance didn’t change.

DW: The Pentagon says it’s releasing all of these and that this is not the last batch. They’re going to continue releasing more batches. They say they’re doing it because, and I’m going to quote President Trump directly here, that “…People should be able to decide for themselves what the hell is going on.” Is that how scientific transparency is supposed to work?

AL: It’s good to see these files released, but they do not include data of scientific quality so far. The U.S. government may have scientific quality data, for example from satellites where you can get very high-resolution images and monitor how an object moves relative to the patterns on the ground, but they haven’t released that yet. So, for me the releases so far are more an encouragement to follow on these reports with scientific work the way I am doing in the Galileo Project. Presumably, if the objects existed for decades, then they exist also now and so we can actually find them. I’m much more in favor of the future than the past because we cannot go back in time and the best is yet to come.

If we detect any of these objects with the Galileo observatories that are currently operating, then we would have much more information and it will be shared with the public because our sensors are not classified.

The way to clear up this subject is to invest in research rather than going back in time. I think the government also needs to invest in using better equipment that will gather higher-quality data. Maybe they have some materials from crash sites. In that case, I can easily bring it to the laboratory of the Galileo project where we can immediately assess if it came from outside the solar system. We did that for an interstellar meteor that crashed in 2014. I led an expedition that retrieved some materials from the bottom of the ocean outside the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea. Our analysis demonstrated that a fraction of that material is indeed from outside the solar system based on chemical composition and isotopic analysis. We can do that analysis as long as the government will work with us.

I hope that the future will allow us to figure out what these unidentified objects are. We must stay curious. The important point is that we should not dismiss it or ridicule the subject but instead take it seriously and figure it out the scientific way. If we will find that any technological object is extraterrestrial beyond a reasonable doubt, I will not waste time going to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize ceremony because I will have much more important matters to attend to regarding the implications of such a discovery. Who cares about an award given by humans to humans if you’re encountering alien technology?

The discovery is more important than artificial intelligence in terms of shaping our future because artificial intelligence is based on the training data set limited to this Earth, whereas alien technology is based on a training data set beyond this earth. There is much more real estate beyond this earth and we don’t know much about it.

DW: Avi, you yourself say that most of these cases, at least in these files, are probably human-made, that they are from Earth. It sounds like you’re holding out a lot of hope that there may be a discovery from beyond this Earth. Why are you so hopeful? Why, despite your own assessment, are you really holding out this hope that something extraterrestrial will be found?

AL: For a variety of reasons. First, when I follow geopolitics, I don’t find a lot of intelligence in the way that humans behave on this Earth. And so, I’m hoping for a higher level of intelligence from space. But also, when I was younger, before I met my wife, I used to go on blind dates and my hope was always to aim high rather than low. My colleagues in the astronomy community are obsessed with searching for microbes. These are the most common forms of life that you may find out there. But if you go on an interstellar date, obviously you can aim at the most mediocre dating partners. You can marry the first one that you meet. But my objective is to find someone who is more intelligent than we are because this way we can learn something new from that experience. Instead of allocating all the research funds, the way that the astronomy community is doing right now, to the search for microbes, I would allocate billions of dollars also to the search for technological signatures in the form of objects that arrive into the solar system from outside, just because we didn’t do that. Maybe there is something out there.

I’m hopeful because originally Enrico Fermi asked the question: “Where is everybody?” He asked it 12 years before I was born. But if I was there, I would have put my arm around his shoulder and said: “Enrico, don’t be so presumptuous. You’re not that attractive. This is a question that every lonely person asks. Where is my dating partner? And the answer is, you have to search for them. You have to build a telescope. You have to look around. You can’t just ask this question and hope that the partner will show up in front of you.” And Enrico didn’t build any telescope. So, my point is that without searching, we will not find anything. And when we do search, when we go on dates, we have to be hopeful that our dating partner might be more intelligent than we are. Because if we always focus on mediocre dating partners like microbes, we might miss the opportunity to learn from someone who is better than us.

DW: Professor Avi Loeb, thank you so much for talking to me and good luck finding a more intelligent life out there.

AL: I’m doing my best. I found my wife on Earth, but maybe there is someone even more intelligent in the Universe at large. I don’t know. We will see.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “*Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “[Life in the Cosmos](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674987579)”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “[Interstellar](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/interstellar-avi-loeb-1?variant=40982888415266)*”, was published in August 2024.

Professional website:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Social media:

*https://avi-loeb.medium.com/ [https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb](https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb)*

*https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd [https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb](https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb)*