The future of the search for alien life is with Harvard’s Avi Loeb. He has plenty of critics

Avi Loeb leaned in, grabbed my hand and said, “Be as critical as you like.”

What, after all, was one more critic?

He resembled a caricature of a scientist, his body wiry and short, in a plaid tailored suit, holding an expression that suggested both the severely etched Oppenheimer and the anxious, chain-smoking lawyer Martin Short played years ago on “Saturday Night Live.” Certainly, that’s the image many of his peers seem to hold for Loeb: one part austerity meets one part sketchy. He is a theoretical astrophysicist. He teaches astronomy at Harvard University and chaired the department for nine years. He is also the director of the Institute for Theory and Computation, the founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative and former chair of the National Academies’ Board on Physics and Astronomy. For decades, he’s been known as a prolific voice on dark matter, black holes, the formation of stars.

When I met him late last year at the University of Chicago, where he was appearing as part of a Chicago Humanities Festival event, he tended to avoid eye contact and look at the ground, gather his thoughts then gush information — a kind of astrophysical firehose.

For light elevator chat, he explained how the sun acts like a battery.

Where he rubs some people the wrong way is when he starts talking about aliens.

“Avi is doing incredibly important work as one of our most important figures in the contemporary search for extraterrestrial intelligence,” said Garrett Graff, a longtime journalist on national security and Pulitzer Prize finalist whose latest book is “UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here — and Out There.” “But also, I think a lot of what’s controversial about him stems from peers who think Avi becomes either too flip with his science or crosses the line from skeptic to advocate.”

They say Loeb is outlandish and disingenuous, prone to sensational claims, more interested in being a celebrity than an astrophysicist — not to mention distracting and misleading, at a moment when the science community is defending its very foundations.

For his part, Loeb, at 61, rarely lets a criticism pass unattended.

The search for alien life became his life’s mission, in a way, exactly one decade ago, when, on Jan. 8, 2014, a fireball crashed in the Pacific Ocean, off Papua New Guinea. Several years later, after Loeb and Amir Siraj, a Harvard undergraduate, picked through the United States government’s data on the speed and movement of the fireball, Loeb told interviewers it could be interstellar technology, piloted by artificial intelligence. By then, though, he had already made headlines after a long, cigar-shaped object — since named Oumuamua, or Hawaiian for “scout” — passed by Earth in 2017. Loeb theorized that, considering the trajectory and quickness of the object, it could be alien technology using a light sail, boosting speed with sunlight the way sailboats rely on the wind. Many more scientists argued it was naturally created, perhaps a rock or a comet.

Scientific disagreement tends to be polite.

But Loeb, with little encouragement, complains of scientists who criticize him “without doing anything themselves.” He complains of science driven by jealousy, egos and drive-by opinions. He says the public is more interested in discovering if there is life beyond Earth than, say, pouring multibillions into particle-physics research at facilities like Fermilab outside Chicago and the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. He said during our talk that, considering the billions and billions of planets in the universe, any search for intelligent life would be less speculative than discovering new particles. At the Humanities Festival, Loeb told moderator Dan Hooper, a senior scientist at Fermilab, that particle colliders “just confirmed old news from the 1960s — how particles interact.” Hooper countered that scientists know more about physics since building colliders and that Loeb is misrepresenting how scientists feel about research and the scientific process. Loeb responded that the intent of Large Hadron was to find particles and it didn’t, “for $10 billion.”

“Avi,” Hooper said, “one of us on this stage is a particle physicist and it’s not you.”

The audience collectively squirmed.

And yet, that a conversation about extraterrestrial life was happening at all among academics was telling.

Sitting between Hooper and Loeb, almost symbolically neutral, was Graff, whose approach to the search for aliens is as practical and sober as Loeb’s is eager.

He’s a former editor at Politico and Washingtonian magazine. He’s authored deeply researched, nuanced histories about Sept. 11, Watergate and the federal government’s plans to survive a nuclear war. To see him at a scholarly event in Hyde Park, beside a Harvard scientist, even one as controversial as Loeb, is a portrait of how seriously the discussion about UFOs has become — particularly since 2017, when the military and CIA came forward to say, yes, there are flying objects that they cannot readily explain.

“I am not a lifelong UFO-ologist,” Graff told me later. “I am not even deeply schooled in pop culture about aliens. But while covering national security, I saw the topic move to the fore in such a way that it was a serious topic of serious conversation among serious people. When people like (former CIA director) John Brennan began talking about it, you get interested. I mean, scientists can be humble about what they know and don’t. But it’s a lot harder for a government bureaucracy to say: ‘We spend $60 billion a year on intelligence, $800 billion on national defense, $100 billion on homeland security, but there is stuff up there and we don’t know what it is and we do not want to tell you that.’”

For much of the 20th century, the search for extraterrestrial life and UFOs — or rather, as the government rebranded them, UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena — had been the territory of fringe amateurs, Hollywood filmmakers and tabloids. To see a scholar as solidly mainstream and institutionally rooted as Loeb wade willingly into UFOs was rare.

But not unheard of. As Graff’s history details, some of the more meaningful research on the search for aliens has emerged out of Chicago’s intellectual community: J. Allen Hynek, a Chicago-born astronomer who later chaired Northwestern University’s astronomy department, was a former UFO skeptic whose investigations for the U.S. government’s Project Blue Book led to his founding the Center for UFO Studies in 1973 (the group still has Chicago headquarters). There’s also Frank Drake, another Chicago-born astronomer, who pioneered the foundation for SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He formulated the Drake Equation, which aimed, theoretically, to calculate the likelihood of extraterrestrial life using the number of planets that could sustain life and advanced technology. It was, in a way, an answer to the Fermi Paradox, which was born out of a conversation in 1950 among scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Enrico Fermi quipped something like: If there is so much life in the universe, why haven’t we seen it?

Loeb, it goes without saying, is Team Drake.

During his time in Hyde Park, he swung by “Nuclear Energy,” the bulbous Henry Moore sculpture off 56th Street that commemorates Fermi’s construction of the first nuclear reactor. He recalled reading Fermi’s papers as a young student. “As anyone who’s seen ‘Oppenheimer’ knows, he was probably as responsible for the success of the Manhattan Project as anyone. He understood both the theory and experiment. Oppenheimer was more of a theorist and manager. Which is why I’ve been puzzled by the Fermi Paradox.

“He asked, in an Italian accent, so where is everybody? But who would stand in their home and decide there’s nobody next to me therefore I am alone? At least look out a window! Fermi didn’t even bring a telescope. Would aliens visit him in Los Alamos? During lunch hour? They could have visited Earth millions of years earlier. It’s a very bad question.”

Indeed, as Graff said, historically, the problem with the conversation around UFOs has always been too binary and simplistic for even the smartest minds in science to arrive anywhere meaningful: “People think ‘UFOS aren’t real, so therefore aliens aren’t real.’ Or ‘Aliens are real, therefore UFOs must be aliens.’ Carl Sagan (himself a University of Chicago alum) decided, if aliens come here, statistically, it’s every 100,000 or 200,000 years, and so, statistically, it’s unlikely that was an alien you saw last Thursday night.”

Loeb pictures himself occupying a grayer area.

In his recent book, “Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars,” Loeb writes that he “can think of no scientific discovery that will more fundamentally transform our civilization and brighten its prospects than the proof we are not the sole technologically capable civilization in the universe.” But he wants hard evidence. So, in 2021, he cofounded a research program, using funds from private donors, to find and identify alien technology in the vicinity of Earth. He wants to apply rigorous scientific method to locating and analyzing objects, moving UFO research away from blury video and iffy anecdotes.

It’s not for nothing that he named his Harvard-based initiative the Galileo Project. Loeb reminds himself that lots of scientists were controversial in their own times. Galileo spent the last part of his life under house arrest, for showing that the sun was the center of the universe, not the Earth. After his paper on Oumuamua came out in 2018, an Italian reporter asked if he felt like Galileo, pushing back against conventional wisdom.

“I told her that I didn’t,” Loeb said, “and yet, there is that common thread there among scientists who want to break the mold. I mean, it’s better now! I am not under house arrest! People want to feel like they are the center of the universe. That was Galileo’s problem. For me, it’s showing that there might be someone else out there — it’s not about whether we are the physical center of the universe than the intellectual center. All I’m saying is, let’s look at evidence. Even SETI (radio towers) were about, more or less, waiting for a phone call. But what if nobody’s calling at the same time you are listening?”

Loeb is, in a sense, taking a very long view, placing himself in historic company: Maybe he’s hard to deal with, and maybe he’s not the kindest to those who disagree, and maybe he’s glib with pronouncements, but ... do you want to play Inquisitor to his Galileo?

I asked if, in a way, any search for extraterrestrial life requires an iconoclast, someone willing to upset?

He replied: “We all die eventually. What is the point in pretending otherwise? The most powerful kings, all-powerful in their times — they also died. Like all of us. The fundamental fact about our existence is that we are not that important, and science wants to say it is important and so it needs to present a powerful image, and I’m saying, forget about that, the posterity and self-importance, and let’s just figure this out.”

Talking with him, it’s easy to see how well-meaning intentions get buried under rhetoric. It’s also easy to see why, despite his gravitas, some colleagues refuse to peer-review his papers, traditionally a major part of the process. Loeb grew up on a chicken farm in Israel and found his way to science during compulsory military service with the Israeli Defense Force. He describes himself, even now, as “a curious farm boy.” He said he was “traumatized” at family dinners. He would ask hard questions and get bad answers. “The adults in the room pretended to know more than they knew. They could not admit when they didn’t know. I became a scientist to answer questions myself. That I became chair of Harvard astronomy is irrelevant. I am a farm boy. I maintain my innocence in the sense I refuse to be one of the adults in the room.”

He returns again and again to colleagues who “call me names” but never call for more funding for his research. He pictures the Galileo Project expanding into an international network of research stations and telescopes — but that demands funding. Albeit, a fraction of what’s spent on particle colliders, he said. He’s raised $5 million; the Netflix cameras that followed his expedition last year to find bits of the Papua New Guinea fireball could quicken imaginations and lead to more money.

He faces “headwinds,” he said. But he could also be the right person for this job.

Graff describes the subject as a mix of science, spirituality, politics and national security, “requiring both believing and holding counterintuitive ideas in your head, all at once.” We are at least 70 years on from Drake’s first work with SETI, he said, “yet we are not appreciably closer to solving this mystery. In fact, we are probably not going to have answers for several decades — or several human lifetimes. It could take centuries, and there is something to me that is beautiful about being part of a human effort that vast.”

Before Loeb left Hyde Park, an elderly man approached him, not willing to wait.

“Avi,” he said, “we have to find life before I die.”

Loeb smiled and said, “Well, I’m working on it.”