In early November 2026, Harvard professor Avi Loeb appeared on Tim Pool's show. The conversation was wide-ranging and lasted almost two hours. The scientist, who heads the Galileo project and sits on the scientific advisory board on UAP, spoke about what usually remains on the periphery of academic discussion: unidentified anomalous phenomena, the possible presence of extraterrestrial technologies, the nature of dark matter, the limits of Einstein's theory of gravity, time travel, and the most important question of all — are we alone in the universe.
Loeb began with a simple observation. The Pentagon and the intelligence community already openly acknowledge the existence of objects that cannot be identified. For him, this is a signal: it is time to move from stories to the collection of evidence. The scientific method, in his view, is capable of closing the gap between those who believe in aliens and those who deny any anomaly. Any result would be valuable. If the objects turn out to be the terrestrial technology of adversaries, that is a matter of national security. If even a small fraction of them are of extraterrestrial origin, humanity will face the most significant discovery in its history and will receive a direct answer to the Fermi paradox.
Particularly intriguing is the reasoning about why we may fail to notice the presence of "neighbors." Modern telescopes see objects the size of a football field poorly at the distance from Earth to the Sun. Fast-moving craft leave only faint streaks on images, which astronomers often mistake for noise. But there is also a more radical possibility. About 84 percent of the matter in the universe is dark. We know of it only through its gravitational influence. Loeb allows that dark matter is capable of forming its own structures — "dark planets" and even civilizations that interact with ordinary matter exclusively through gravity. Their ships could theoretically pass through the Earth and even the Sun while remaining invisible to our instruments.
This is precisely where the conversation turns to the theory of gravity. Einstein's general theory of relativity is well tested under conditions of high accelerations, but in the regime of very weak cosmic accelerations its accuracy remains in question. It is possible that dark matter and dark energy are merely "ghosts" arising from the incompleteness of the current model. This is an unpopular idea, yet the absence of direct detection of dark matter particles leaves room for doubt.
Loeb goes even further when he reasons about negative mass. If it could be obtained, gravitational attraction could be neutralized. A payload paired with an equal negative mass would simply "float up" out of Earth's gravity without fuel. This would completely change the approach to spaceflight. Moreover, negative mass opens the way to conceptual time machines and wormholes. Many physicists consider such matter impossible because of contradictions with quantum mechanics. But an encounter with a more advanced civilization could provide the answer that our laboratories do not yet have.
Loeb also emphasizes the limitations of our imagination. We tend to picture aliens as resembling ourselves, whereas an intelligence capable of crossing interstellar distances would almost certainly operate on a completely different level — most likely in the form of self-replicating artificial systems. Contemporary artificial intelligence is trained exclusively on terrestrial data. An extraterrestrial superintelligence could operate with knowledge that is as yet inaccessible to us.
The entire conversation is permeated by a calm readiness to look into the unknown. Loeb does not claim that alien ships are already here, nor does he offer ready-made answers. He merely shows how many "blank spots" remain in our picture of the world — from the nature of most of the matter in the universe to possible traces of technologies that we do not yet know how to recognize. And he invites us to treat these gaps not with fear or denial, but with the curiosity of an explorer. After all, it is precisely where familiar theories begin to fail that real discoveries most often begin.
