Basement #008: Avi Loeb | 3I Atlas, Alien Craft, and Suppressed Research
3/23/20263 hr 25 min
Avi Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, a internationally bestselling author, and one of the most decorated astronomers alive. He earned his PhD in Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at 24, led the first international project supported by the Strategic Defense Initiative, and spent five years at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton before joining Harvard.
He has published over a thousand scientific papers, written nine books, and in 2025 was ranked third in publication record and research impact among all astronomers worldwide. TIME named him one of the 25...
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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AJ Gentile· Host0:30
Today I'm talking with somebody you probably know, Professor Avi Loeb. He's a theoretical physicist at Harvard. He's the longest-serving chair of the astronomy department in its history, and he has over 1,000 peer-reviewed papers. He's got nine books. The guy's resume is absurd.
Hecklefish· Host0:44
1,000 papers? I wrote one letter to NASA, I got put on a watch list. The system is rigged, human.
AJ Gentile· Host0:50
But here's what makes Avi different from every other Harvard professor. He took all that credibility and aimed it at the one question most scientists are afraid to touch: Are we alone? He's the one who said 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object we ever detected, might be an alien light sail. He dragged a magnet across the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to recover fragments of an interstellar meteor.
Hecklefish· Host1:11
That is the most unhinged sentence I've ever heard, and I'm here for it.
AJ Gentile· Host1:15
And right now, his Galileo project is scanning the skies for unidentified anomalous phenomena.
Hecklefish· Host1:20
Unidentified anomalous phenomena. That's a lot of syllables to avoid saying aliens, human.
AJ Gentile· Host1:26
We get into all of it, his childhood on a farm in Israel, how he