Harvard professor Avi Loeb wants UFO “biologics” as new files raise more questions

The U.S. government has recently released its fifth batch of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) records since President Trump signed an executive order in January directing agencies to make more of this material public. Three of the most notable items in this release come as written witness testimony rather than the videos and images that defined earlier releases. 

Avi Loeb, the Harvard professor who chairs the UAP Science Council advising the government, and Jordan Flowers of the Disclosure Foundation both say the documents raise more questions than they answer, mainly because so much has been blacked out before release.

In an interview with CBS News, Loeb says he wants physical evidence collected directly from crash sites, as it is the one thing that could truly prove something extraordinary happened. "I tried to look for those images or videos, but they were quite disappointing,” he said.

He added, “We need better data, but we have to take it seriously because the biggest mistake a scientist can make is not being curious when the US government, which is not a scientific organization, comes forward and says, you know, we are not doing our job.”

One testimony describes a gunship running a live-fire exercise in the Gulf of Oman in September 2021. As per the files, the crew reported seeing 25 unidentified, sphere-shaped objects, which they described as “cold orbs.” They also noted that these objects seemed to react when the aircraft fired and moved together in unison, almost like a pod of dolphins swimming side by side.

Loeb noted the objects appeared to travel at up to 1.7 times the speed of sound, which makes a drone swarm a shaky explanation. "It could be a very unusual swarm of drones, but at that speed you know it's really difficult to understand them in terms of NOM technologies," he said, referring to non-human technology.

Above is a still frame from the video of a reported “cold orbs" in the Gulf of Oman.

In another one of the files, an analog clock reportedly jumped ahead by 20 minutes compared with two nearby digital clocks. Interestingly, the difference appeared only around the time of an encounter with an unidentified object. Loeb pointed to the case as one of the stranger details in the release. 

Commenting on this unusual reporting, he noted, “There is a second report which talks about an analog clock that went faster by 20 minutes relative to two digital clocks after an encounter with an unidentified anomalous phenomena. And that's very strange. It only happened during that time. And 20 minutes, a significant time difference.”

Two American pilots described seeing a craft roughly 500 feet long flying over Afghanistan at 150 knots, or about 77 meters per second. Loeb pointed out that no operational aircraft comes close to that size. Even the largest plane ever built measures around 385 feet, which is still well short of what the pilots described. 

On top of that, the same pilot shared that recurring sightings of unexplained lights were seen between midnight and 3 a.m. in October 2023. Some of these lasted for hours. But Loeb noted that satellites usually stay visible for only five to seven minutes before dropping below the horizon, and this makes this explanation very unlikely.