Loeb, Avi

Loeb, Avi –

Abraham “Avi” Loeb (Hebrew: אברהם (אבי) לייב; 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.[1][2][3][4][5][6] 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).

In 2018, he suggested that alien space craft may be in the Solar System, using ʻOumuamua as an example.[7] In 2023, he claimed to have recovered material from an interstellar meteor that could be evidence of an alien starship,[8] which some experts criticized as hasty and sensational.[9] 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.[10]

 – Wikipedia 7/29/2025

 

24-year-old Avi Loeb (right) presenting slides in February 1986 to Lt. General James Abrahamson (white shirt, left), with results from the first international project supported by President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed `Star Wars’. (Image credit: Loeb’s photo archive)

“The `Star Wars’ program was headed by Lt. General James A. Abrahamson from the U.S. Air Force, a past director of the Space Shuttle Program at NASA.

Coincidentally, in August 1983 I completed basic officer training and a Bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics within the prestigious `Talpiot’ program of the Israeli military. In collaboration with the experimentalist Dr. Zvi Kaplan, I proposed a novel method for accelerating masses to high-speeds using electric energy.

The energy released by chemical propellants heats the burnt gas to a temperature of a few thousand degrees Kelvin. The resulting sound speed, of order a kilometer per second, does not allow the gas to push a projectile faster than twice this speed, because the pressure wave cannot catch up with a faster projectile. However, the controlled release of electrically-stored energy into hotter gas of charged particles (plasma) with a low atomic weight could bring the sound speed to higher values, allowing to launch masses up to extremely high speeds which are of interest for chasing ballistic missiles. At age 21, I led the theoretical research on this novel acceleration scheme. Remarkably, my simple scaling model described the detailed experimental results as the size of the system was increased by a factor of a hundred. This taught me that physics works.

General Abrahamson visited Israel in 1984, and I presented the project to him along with Zvi. `Gen Abe’ was impressed and selected our proposal as the first international project to be funded under the Strategic Defense Initiative.”

 

“I graduated from the Plasma Physics programme at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and while in the army, I helped with the development of the Star Wars or Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) project promoted by President Ronald Reagan’s administration. The purpose of this project was to build a space-based weapons defence system capable of preventing a nuclear attack on US soil against intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.”

 

 

“The story also charged that administration officials used the faked missile test to fool Congress as well as the Soviets. Sen. David Pryor of Arkansas, a longtime critic of the Star Wars program, has demanded an investigation by the General Accounting Office and the Defense Department. “This looks like pure, out-and-out deception,” Pryor said. “It looks to me like the shades of either Oliver North or Irangate, [the executive branch] thumbing [its] nose at the legislative branch.” Worse, Pryor added, Congress may have been misled into spending far more on SDI than the program merited.

Enter former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and Maj. Gen. Eugene Fox, who ran the test program for the U.S. Army. Weinberger, who according to the Times had approved the deception, denied that the missile test was rigged or that there was any attempt to mislead Congress into spending more on SDI. And Fox, now retired, said that he and his staff “did not cheat, steal, rob or fake a test,” and that he knew nothing about any attempt to deceive the Soviets or Congress.”

 

 

“In the cold and indifferent void of space, an interstellar object the size of Manhattan rushes towards our tiny planet. This coming November, Earth may be invaded by an advanced Extraterrestrial civilization, or it might just be a passing comet named 3I/Atlas. In Brad’s belated return to the pod, he and Jake brace our listeners for the imminent attack, with only Travis as humanity’s last rational hope. With urgent warnings from an unlikely cadre of blind Bulgarian prophets, Christian doomsday accounts, and esteemed Harvard astrophysicists, could there be something more than conspiracy slop to this story? Probably not… but just in case, board the QAA mothership for Jake and Brad’s Excellent Invasion.” 

 

 

 

Interesting Quotes from Avi Loeb:

“That night, Ackman and Oxman hosted a dinner at their Upper West Side apartment, a gathering of World Minds, an “invitation-only community” funded by the media conglomerate Axel Springer that is a kind of rotating series of Davos-lite dinner parties — the kind of places where VIPs discuss the world’s problems over cocktails (Oxman is a member of the group’s advisory board). The featured guests were two members of the World Minds network: David Petraeus, former CIA director and current partner at the private-equity firm KKR, and Avi Loeb, an Israeli astrophysicist at Harvard. The war in Gaza had been raging for a month, and Petraeus gave a dispiriting talk about the broader geopolitical fallout. Later in the evening, in a call for dialogue among different tribes, Paola Antonelli, a curator at MoMA, offered a thought. “Love the aliens!” she said.

Loeb took the idea and suggested looking for hope from above. “My personal belief is that the Messiah will arrive, not necessarily from Brooklyn, as some Orthodox Jews believe, but rather from outer space,” Loeb told the group. The extraterrestrial Messiah’s message, he said, would be to stop fighting over territory here “because there is much more real estate available throughout the universe.” Back on Earth, Loeb listened while Ackman said he was hopeful that Gay would respond to his letter. “I’m a theoretical physicist, so I get paid to make predictions, and I said to him, ‘I don’t think you will,’” Loeb told me. “The last thing Harvard would do is admit their mistakes.””

 

 

Search Anomaly Archives for more on “Loeb”