WASHINGTON (Nexstar) – A new government report is raising eyebrows across the country — especially among anyone interested in extraterrestrial — as physicist and Harvard professor Abraham “Avi” Loeb says there’s a possibility humans aren’t the only civilization in the universe.
“Whether we live in such a reality or not is not a philosophical question, we just have to look out,” Loeb said.
Loeb teamed up with the Pentagon office that investigates unidentified aerial phenomena, and they came up with a draft report that says it’s possible alien ships have already visited our solar system.
Specifically, Loeb thinks the first interstellar object spotted passing through our solar system in 2017, given the name Oumuamua, could be an extraterrestrial mothership.
Loeb says it didn’t have the characteristics you’d find in meteors or other known objects.
“We consider a possibility where an object as big as Oumuamua, which was a football field size, is a mothership,” Loeb said.
He says the mothership could have released smaller ships – or probes – to study our solar system after spending a long time to get here.
“With chemical rockets, it takes less than a billion years to traverse the entire Milky Way galaxy,” Loeb explained.
Loeb says if Oumuamua was a ship, there likely wasn’t life on it. Instead, he believes it could have been operated by an artificial intelligence system “that stays dormant for that period and just gets activated when it comes close to its target.”
Professor Loeb has dedicated his career to exploring the possibility that extraterrestrial civilizations exist and has written several books on the topic. He received a Ph.D. in plasma physics when he was 24 years old.