(NewsNation) — Thousands of UFO researchers are preparing to gather at the Contact in the Desert conference, including Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who joined NewsNation to talk about the state of UFO research.
“There is more and more data that something is happening that we don’t fully understand because the intelligence and the military agencies are telling us that there is something out there,” Loeb said.
The real question, he said, is whether unexplained objects seen in the sky are equipment from adversarial nations or something more exotic, including the possibility of extraterrestrial involvement.
While Loeb has called for more congressional investment in research, he says there is no need for those interested in UFOs to wait for the government to tell them what is happening.
“The sky is not classified,” Loeb said.
Over the past year, Loeb said that an observatory detected a million objects, and a fraction of them are outliers that still need to be understood.
“We’re now developing a method to infer distances so we can really tell if their performance is outside the envelopes of human-made technologies. And we are building two additional observatories, one in Pennsylvania and the other one in Nevada,” Loeb said.
While the majority of objects people see are likely to have mundane, terrestrial origins, Loeb says it is still worth studying and worth the government sharing data with scientists.
“Even if one in a million of these objects is of extraterrestrial origin, it would be the biggest discovery in science ever,” Loeb said.