Harvard astronomy professor Avi Loeb said Saturday on Newsmax’s "Wake Up America Weekend" that it is “most likely we are not alone,” weighing in after former President Barack Obama said on a podcast that he believes aliens are real, though he has not seen them.
"Well, most likely we are not alone. The only question is whether they are visiting us in our backyard right now. That’s the fundamental question," Loeb said.
Loeb added that the U.S. government appears to possess data pointing to unexplained phenomena.
"It looks like the U.S. government does have data evidence that indicates things that are not fully understood," he said.
However, he suggested such information is often sidelined within intelligence agencies and the Pentagon. "Very often such things are brushed aside because they don’t involve national security. The people who review the data just can’t figure it out," Loeb said.
He added that officials may also avoid scrutiny, noting, "They prefer not to be scrutinized because if they can’t figure something out, it could be like the Chinese spy balloon … Congress looks over their shoulders."
"For these reasons, there are lots of things that are classified but potentially of interest to the scientific community," he continued.
Loeb argued scientists should have access to help analyze the material.
"Government is not a scientific organization, so scientists could help them figure things out, especially if we are talking about objects that did not arrive here from the solar system. They came from another star," he said.
Pointing to the vast scale of the universe, Loeb noted, "There are 100 billion stars like the sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone."
He added that "it takes less than a billion years to cross the entire Milky Way galaxy at the speed of the Voyager spacecraft that we built with 1970s technologies,” and that “most of the stars formed billions of years before the sun."
"There was plenty of time for other civilizations to arrive to our backyard," Loeb said.
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