Avi Loeb

Abraham Loeb was born in 1962 on a family farm in Beit Hanan, Israel, approximately twenty kilometres from Tel Aviv. In 1980 he was selected for the Talpiyot programme, an elite Israeli military science track that selects twenty-five high-school graduates each year for combined advanced academic study and national service. He completed his undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1983, his master's in physics in 1985, and his doctorate in physics in 1986, all at the same institution. His doctoral thesis addressed particle acceleration and coherent radiation amplification in plasmas. The Hebrew University awarded him its distinction as best master's student of the Faculty of Science, summa cum laude.

From 1988 to 1993 Loeb held a long-term membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he turned from plasma physics to theoretical astrophysics. He joined Harvard's Department of Astronomy as assistant professor in 1993 and rose to full professor by 1997. He chaired the department from 2011 to 2020, the longest-serving chair in its history, and has held the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professorship of Science since 2012. He directs the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and in 2016 founded Harvard's Black Hole Initiative, the first interdisciplinary centre devoted to the study of black holes.

Beyond Harvard, Loeb chaired the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies from 2018 to 2021 and served on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology under President Donald Trump in 2020. He chaired the advisory committee for the Breakthrough Starshot initiative from 2016 to 2024. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002.

On 19 October 2017, the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Hawaii detected an object moving through the solar system on a trajectory that could only be interstellar. Designated 1I/2017 U1 and named 'Oumuamua, it was the first confirmed interstellar object observed by astronomers. Its properties were anomalous: an extreme brightness variation suggesting a flat shape, a non-gravitational acceleration away from the Sun without the cometary outgassing that would normally explain such motion, and an origin in the local standard of rest.

In November 2018, Loeb and Shmuel Bialy published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters proposing that 'Oumuamua's acceleration could be explained by solar radiation pressure acting on a thin, light-sail-like structure, with a required mass-to-area ratio of approximately 0.1 grams per square centimetre. In January 2021 Loeb published "Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), presenting his case that the object's observed properties were consistent with an artificial artefact. The book became a New York Times bestseller and received the 2023 Cosmos Award. Other researchers proposed alternative natural explanations, including the nitrogen-ice hypothesis published by Steven Desch and Alan Jackson in the Astrophysical Journal Letters in 2021.

On 26 July 2021, Loeb and Frank Laukien, a visiting scholar at Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and chairman of Bruker Corporation, announced the founding of the Galileo Project at a public press conference. The project's stated purpose was to bring "the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research." Two catalysts were cited on the record: the anomalous properties of 'Oumuamua and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's preliminary assessment on unidentified aerial phenomena, delivered to the United States Congress on 25 June 2021. Initial funding of approximately $1.75 million came from private donors.

The project established three research branches: ground-based observatories to monitor the atmosphere using calibrated multi-modal sensor arrays with artificial-intelligence classification; interstellar object detection through astronomical surveys including the future Vera C. Rubin Observatory; and interstellar meteor recovery. By May 2023 the project had published its first seven peer-reviewed papers in the Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation. As of 2025, the project lists nineteen peer-reviewed publications on its official website. Three observatories now operate continuously in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.

In June 2023 the Galileo Project conducted a fourteen-day expedition aboard the vessel M/V Silver Star in the Pacific Ocean, approximately 85 kilometres north of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. The expedition sought to recover material from CNEOS 2014-01-08, a bolide detected by United States government satellite sensors on 8 January 2014 whose interstellar origin the United States Space Command certified in a March 2022 memorandum to NASA at 99.999 per cent confidence. The team recovered approximately 700 metallic spherules from the ocean floor. Laboratory analysis at Harvard and other institutions identified a subset with a composition pattern designated BeLaU, showing beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium concentrations up to three orders of magnitude above known solar-system materials. The findings were published in Chemical Geology in September 2024.

In November 2024, Loeb prepared a written statement for the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. He was not called to testify but published the statement, in which he described the Galileo Project's observatory results and called for federal funding from the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Energy, or the Department of Defense for scientific research on unidentified aerial phenomena.

In May 2026, following the release of 161 records through the Department of Defense's PURSUE programme, Loeb and his team published an analysis concluding that none of the released objects required an explanation involving non-human technology. He characterised the release as "a transparency action with civic value, not a scientific dataset." On 17 April 2026, Representative Anna Paulina Luna visited Loeb at the Harvard College Observatory, the first documented direct meeting between the congressional UAP oversight effort and the Galileo Project's research team.

Loeb has published nine books and over 725 peer-reviewed papers, as counted by the Harvard Gazette in April 2020. Key publications in the documentary record:

• Bialy, S. & Loeb, A. "Could Solar Radiation Pressure Explain 'Oumuamua's Peculiar Acceleration?" Astrophysical Journal Letters, 868(1), L1, 2018.
• Loeb, A. Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.
• Lingam, M. & Loeb, A. Life in the Cosmos: From Biosignatures to Technosignatures. Harvard University Press, 2021.
• Loeb, A. & Laukien, F. "Overview of the Galileo Project." Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation, 12(1), 2340003, 2023.
• Loeb, A. Interstellar. HarperCollins, 2023.
• Loeb, A. et al. "Chemical Classification of Spherules Recovered from the Pacific Ocean Site of the CNEOS 2014-01-08 (IM1) Bolide." Chemical Geology, 670, 122415, 2024.
• Domine, L. et al. "Commissioning An All-Sky Infrared Camera Array for Detection of Airborne Objects." Sensors, 25, 783, 2025.

Government documents in the record include the ODNI Preliminary Assessment on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (25 June 2021) and the United States Space Command memorandum to NASA certifying the interstellar origin of CNEOS 2014-01-08 (1 March 2022).

The NHI Archive's existing coverage of Loeb and the Galileo Project:

• The Galileo Project: Harvard's Systematic Search for Extraterrestrial Artefacts
• Avi Loeb Asks Washington for Raw UAP Data, Not Processed Videos (23 April 2026)
• Luna meets Loeb at Harvard, opening a direct working line between the Oversight Task Force and the academic peer-review case (29 April 2026)
• After PURSUE: scientists, witnesses and Congress weigh in on the first UAP tranche (11 May 2026)
• The Scientific Record on UAP: What Official Studies and Reports Have Found (5 April 2026)

This biography is built from publicly available primary material: Loeb's Harvard curriculum vitae and autobiographical sketch, the Galileo Project's official website and founding announcement, the peer-reviewed papers cited above, and the Harvard Gazette. The archive documents Loeb's stated positions and the published record; it takes no position on the interpretation of 'Oumuamua or the IM1 spherules. If anything here needs correcting, please get in touch.