Avi Loeb

Abraham "Avi" Loeb (; born February 26, 1962) is an Israeli and American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology. Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, where since 2007 he has been Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics. He chaired the Department of Astronomy from 2011 to 2020, and founded the Black Hole Initiative in 2016.

Loeb is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics. In 2015, he was appointed as the science theory director for the Breakthrough Initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.

Loeb has published popular science books including ''Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth'' (2021) and ''Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars'' (2023).

Since 2017, Loeb has argued that alien space craft may be in the Solar System, arguing that ʻOumuamua and other interstellar objects, including the reputedly interstellar meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08 are potential examples of such craft. These claims have been widely rejected by the scientific community. In 2023, he claimed to have recovered spherules formed by the impact of CNEOS 2014-01-08 that he alleged could be evidence of an alien starship, which a number of experts criticized as hasty and sensational. Other experts showed that Loeb mistook ordinary truck traffic for a seismic evidence of the meteor, causing him to look hundreds of miles in the wrong direction, and that there was little evidence that the spherules originated from CNEOS 2014-01-08. Provided by Wikipedia