Recently we discussed the annoying thing where various members of prestige news media, people who are usually pretty strongly identified with the position that we should make our decisions based on hard empirical evidence, have this soft spot for the ridiculous theory that UFOs are space aliens. See also here. As always when this comes up, I’ll agree that all things are possible. UFOs could be space aliens, there could be ghosts in your attic, various people in the Bible may have indeed spoken directly with supernatural beings, Thor may really be up in the sky throwing thunderbolts, subliminal smiley faces actually could cause large changes in opinion on immigration, the moon landings might be fake, etc etc etc. I just haven’t any good evidence for these claims–and the evidence presented for UFOs being space aliens has that familiar pattern of disintegration upon close examination, and this motivates proponents of the idea to push hard on second-order arguments implying the suppression of evidence; see here for a discussion of one such example.
Here’s what I wrote when this came up before:
So . . . what happened? How did Scientific American, the Guardian, and NPR get conned? The answer is, they didn’t get conned. They wanted clicks, they got clicks. Many of the news media articles on this space aliens guy cover their butts, just a little, by pointing to skeptics. But not in a balanced way. The Scientific American article has three paragraphs about Loeb and only one paragraph about his skeptics, followed by an interview with Loeb featuring no tough questions. The Guardian article has a question mark in its title—good for them!—but the actual article, which is 16 paragraphs long, has only three and a half paragraphs expressing any skepticism. Etc.
Journalists have a reputation for skepticism. But, as we’ve discussed in the past in the context of Gladwell/Freakonomics/NPR/Ted/etc., credulity is a kind of superpower for a journalist. If you’re willing to believe, you can write these clickety-click stories with no pangs of conscience.
But not every journalist makes the decision to get conned:
How did sports site Defector nail it? I think it’s because, if you’re a sports journalist, you get familiar with stories where rich guys make stuff up and get fawning media coverage. From that perspective, this Harvard dude with the space aliens isn’t so different from some zillionaire who greases the local politicians and press in order to get funding for a new stadium.
The Nice House on the Lake
I hadn’t thought about these aliens for a few months, and then two new items arrived in the email to shake me out of my torpor.
Palko pointed me to this video from Rebecca Watson taking down “Avi Loeb, the Harvard Physicist Who Thinks It’s Always Aliens.” I don’t usually like videos, but this one has a transcript. Also it links to a video with the delightful title, “One Disgraced Scientist Gets an NBC Show, Another Becomes a Libel Bully.”
Those links are from a couple years ago so I don’t know why Palko pointed me to them now. In his email, Palko wrote, “I know you’ve done one post on Loeb but you might want to spend a bit more time on his case.” I find the story of Loeb himself to be super boring. A successful academic who doubles down on a speculative idea and soaks up the publicity? We’ve heard that one a few zillion times before. The interesting thing to me about these stories is not the deluded egomaniacs who associate themselves with them, so much as the otherwise-sane journalists who lap it all up. Hence my earlier posts on the topic.
Anyway, this dude seems to be in the news. I say this in light of this recent post by Paul Campos which amusingly ties this space-alien stuff to the stock market. Campos is writing a book on stupidity, and, as we know, the most interesting examples are when rich and well-connected people say or do stupid things (this one remains my favorite example), so I can see how this example caught his attention.
When Campos pointed me to his recent post, I replied:
Just a few days ago one of my regular tipsters recommended I post something on this, so now I guess I will . . . it should appear in Nov or so.
To which Campos responded:
You’re going to be really embarrassed if the aliens show up before then.
But I got in the last word:
Only if they reveal themselves. If they remain masked as humans, I’ll be just fine.
Maybe they’ll mask themselves as Harvard professors and elite journalists . . . who knows?
More seriously, the current Federal administration continually spins absurdities, contradictions, falsehoods, and undermines human dignity. Journalists appear to try to hold them to account – but only at times. The response has been to shut out journalists who even make feeble attempts. So, perhaps the journalists have decided that UFOs and ghosts are their only outlet for staying employed. I realize that these stories predate Trump’s presidency, but I’m becoming a little sympathetic to journalistic impotence (only a little). At least nobody will override their story.
“Journalists have a reputation for skepticism.”
This reputation dates from before I was born, though. Journalists supposedly saw themselves as “tough-minded” people who didn’t share the superstitions of “the common man” and who saw through the pretensions of the elites. When most people apparently think UFOs are silly and superstitious, belief that there’s some secret the elites are holding from us but that investigators can find out (and that it’s as banal as UFOs, not weird like quantum entanglement or RNA) might become attractive to some group of them.
And then there are the kind of writer who think it’s cool that David Foster Wallace made stuff up in his “non-fiction” and aspire to do the same.
I’m not saying aliens, but it’s weird how on the one hand, it’s a known paradox that aliens haven’t contacted us yet, known as the Fermi paradox, but on the other, we ridicule any reports or suggestions that aliens have contacted us.
I do this. I need to scrutinize what I really think about the topic.
The Fermi paradox isn’t just about contact, though. The real mystery is why we don’t see any traces of evidence of alien civilizations having existed in our galaxy through our telescopes and related gadgetry.
Fair point. But I think I also ridicule people who see aliens in odd comets and craters, unusually bright stars, etc.
The real paradox is why aliens would go through all the trouble of making their way to planet earth, then hang around surreptitiously, just abducting the occasional human. Business? Tourism? Voyarism?
Maybe it’s an alien reality TV series.
One hypothesis:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/waste
If there’s a galactic civilization, it’s likely Earth just isn’t very significant. It’s akin to some remote area of Africa or similar, inhabited by primitive tribes. Thus there’s the occasionally alien version of primatologist Jane Goodall who goes to study the natives. Or the equivalent of safaris where the participants are going for vacation, take photographs of the animals but don’t kill them. Maybe there’s a stellar mapping crew around, which is like the surveyors who go to obscure areas to take measurements. Some of the sightings could be because the local ships (not the transports, the daily vehicles) are the equivalent of beater cars held together with duct-tape and chewing gum, and their cloaking devices don’t work well.
It all strikes me as extremely plausible.
Yes, all quite plausible. And I’ve wondered if what we’re seeing is teenage aliens out on a joyride, recklessly pissing off their more responsible elders.
The story of Barney the Parrot comes to mind:
Warwickshire Wildlife Sanctuary is a very peaceful place.
Well it was until the mayor’s wife visited the latest addition: Barney the parrot.
As she came closer to inspect the parrot’s beautiful plumage, Barney saw her
gold chains and regalia.
…
https://davetrott.co.uk/2026/03/whos-a-naughty-boy-then-2/
Loeb found a path to continued relevance through this stuff. Easier than doing work. The scariest part is how these topics are getting drawn into the culture wars as an element in the far right’s Alt-Science worldview. Trump’s 3rd term will see him jailing scientists for hiding the ufos from Atlantis.
Loeb finds “anomalies” that are really only deviations from the Oort cloud + “dirty snowball”/”icy dirtball” model of comets. After the most basic predictions were shown wrong for 67P (Rosetta/Philae mission showed it was dark as coal, hard as rock, and covered in a layer of something like froth), it should have been admitted we don’t know anything about comets.
Instead theres a dogma that got doubled down on, which leaves the door open for Loeb’s god of the gaps strategy when the stream of unexpected observations inevitably ensues.
I think you’re giving him too much credit. It is a long way from the consensus being wrong about 67P to saying that when 3I/ATLAS emerged from behind the sun it might be surrounded by an invading army of alien spacecraft, which idea Loeb floated briefly.
We should give him credit though. What he does is work out the consequences according to the precise consensus theory about how comets behave, and shows how this does not explain what we observe. Then he has his own vague “aliens” (god of the gaps) theory that *is* consistent with the observations.
His aliens theory simply fits the observations better than the precise standard theory. To counter him you need to propose a third explanation (or multiple), that (even if vague) also explains the observations.
Anon:
I disagree with the claim in your last paragraph that, to counter a ridiculous theory, you need to propose an alternative explanation. I agree that it’s helpful to have such an alternative explanation but I don’t see it as necessary.
Can you explain why? If you truly can think of any other explanation you need to go with what you have.
The comet issue is that the same theories that fail when confronted with observation just get repeated. Even when the ice screws/harpoons fail to work, and interfere with a $1 billion dollar project, the same ideas are just repeated again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3I/ATLAS
Anoneuoid,
Every now and then I watch a video of “Penn and Teller’s ‘Fool Us'”, a show in which magicians try to fool Penn and Teller in the way they do a trick.
Sometimes there’s a trick that leaves me completely baffled; I genuinely have no idea how it could be done. I’m familiar with lots of methods in a theoretical sense, having read Henry Hay’s “The Amateur Magician’s Handbook”, and several other books about the practice of ‘magic’, so I’m aware of the general categories of methods that can be used to make something disappear, and I’m aware of many of the specific methods too. And yet, sometimes I just have no idea how it is done. In fact, the whole idea of the show is that sometimes Penn and Teller also can’t figure out how the trick was done, hence the name of the show.
But even though I don’t know how the trick was done, and Penn and Teller don’t know how the trick was done, none of us believe it’s “magic.”
Do you?
Magic is a vague explanation like god and aliens. Your alternative would be “some kind of trick”, another vague theory that could explain anything.
That is not whats going on with these comets. Loeb is working in a situation where a standard precise explanation (that does not work) is insisted upon. If instead we had “some kind of natural explanation”, then that would be just as good (ie poor) an explanation as Loeb’s aliens.
Read some of his blogs. His reasoning is always “a comet is expected to do x, but we observe y, therefore could be aliens”. All that’s needed is an admission that we don’t know what comets should/shouldn’t be doing to begin with.
FYI: https://www.war.gov/UFO/
“In response to President Donald J. Trump’s directive for transparency on U.S. government information regarding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), the Department of War (DOW), with support from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), is overseeing government wide efforts to expeditiously find, review, identify, declassify and publicly release unresolved UAP-related records and historical documents in the federal government’s possession.”
ugh
More: https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4499305/department-of-war-publishes-second-release-of-unidentified-anomalous-phenomena/
Department of War Publishes Second Release of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Files on WAR.GOV/UFO
May 22, 2026 |
Statement Attributable to Assistant to the Secretary of War for Public Affairs and Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell:
Today, the Department of War is publishing the second release of declassified and historical Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) files as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The collection continues to be housed on WAR.GOV/UFO, and additional files will be released on a rolling basis.
It’s sad to see the U.S. government releasing Soviet-style propaganda: “Since the site’s launch on May 8, 2026, WAR.GOV/UFO has received over 1 billion hits worldwide, highlighting the unprecedented levels of interest in both this topic and the Trump administration’s historic transparency effort.”