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Trump releases second tranche of UFO files including reports of 'unexplained green orbs, discs and fireballs'. Tom Swarbrick is joined by Avi Loeb, Physicist & Professor of Science at Harvard University to discuss what the files and documents could mean. The first batch of files was made public on 8 May under the orders of the US President. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the documents, photos and videos of what are officially known as "unidentified anomalous phenomena" had long fuelled speculation. "It's time the American people see it for themselves," he said in a statement. Listen to the full show on the all-new LBC App: https://app.af.lbc.co.uk/btnc/thenewlbcapp #tomswarbrick #science #nasa #usa #usnews #space #astrology #expertise #LBC LBC is the home of live debate around news and current affairs in the UK. Join in the conversation and listen at https://www.lbc.co.uk/ Sign up to LBC’s weekly newsletter here: https://l-bc.co/signup
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0:00
What credibility do you give any of the releasing of these kinds of files, the UAP files
0:06
I've put on my Instagram feed at TSwarbrick1 one of the videos that has come out of it
0:11
You can go and have a look at it there. Let me play you this too, which is from the astronaut Scott Carpenter
0:18
who was on board the Aurora 7 mission. That was the fourth crewed flight of the American project Mercury
0:26
which completed three Earth orbits in a flight that lasted four hours and 56 minutes
0:32
This is him describing phenomena that he observed back in 1962. I have some more of the white particles in view below the capsule
0:47
They appear to be travelling exactly my speed. There is one drifting off
0:52
uh it's going faster than i am as a matter of fact i haven't seen the great numbers of these
1:01
particles but i've seen a few of them their motion is random they look exactly like snowflakes to me
1:09
i think you can see the images in the files that have been released
1:13
again that is an astronaut now astronauts make mistakes they can misread stuff but
1:19
but an astronaut might know what they're talking about when they see things flying around
1:23
The files contain sightings of green orbs, disks and fireballs, many of which have been reported near military bases
1:31
Arvi Loeb is a physicist and professor of science at Harvard University. Thank you very much indeed for coming on the programme again, Arvis
1:36
Good to see you. What to make of all of this? Well, thanks for having me
1:42
There are two possible interpretations. Either, I mean, it's probably a mixed bag
1:47
Either these are all familiar human-made or natural objects, or there are some non-human-made objects
1:57
And either way, this matter is of great importance for national security or for basic science
2:04
I think it may represent a significant flow of the American defense system if we dealing with balloons We know about the Chinese spy balloon that was shut down And in addition to it there were other balloons And presumably the Chinese have many balloons over the U that are not being recognized by the intelligence agencies
2:23
So that's a serious matter. We need to figure out what these objects are, if they are being used by adversarial nations to spy on the U.S
2:31
And this could date back to, you know, to the 1950s when the Russians were very interested in nuclear sites and other sensitive facilities
2:41
So I would say it's definitely a serious matter from the point of view of national security
2:46
And what we I mean, it's possible that these these these reports were classified because the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon are not doing their job
2:57
You know, the defense budget is close to a trillion dollars in 2026, yet they can't identify objects
3:04
That's a serious matter. Now, among the videos, you know, there is one that shows a startling spherical unidentified object going through the clouds
3:15
Another one shows an instantaneous acceleration where an unidentified object moves sideways
3:21
We don't have enough data to ascertain what is the actual speed or whether the camera was moving
3:27
But, you know, there is also a video of a crash site of an identified object
3:34
And that could be just related to a balloon that was shut down
3:38
And, of course, I would love to have the materials that were retrieved from that crash site so we can immediately tell whether they are human made or not
3:50
There is no doubt that this is a serious concern. There are some documents
3:55
You know, one document describes 209 sightings of green orbs, discs, fireballs, between 1948 and 1950
4:06
Well, if we've had all these sightings, Ms Loeb, if we've had these sightings that have existed for years and years
4:11
they always seem to be tantalizingly just out of reach to understand what they are
4:17
Why might that be? Oh that by definition because things that were understood were cataloged as objects that the adversarial nations may be using okay so whatever was understood which is the vast majority i mean there is a huge amount of data collected over the
4:35
years we just see that the tip of the iceberg here of things that were not identified and by
4:40
definition uh they are just at the margin of being identified now the question is what are they and
4:47
most of them are probably human made i i completely agree with that but even if one out of a million
4:52
is non-human made that would be the biggest discovery humanity ever made how can we make
4:57
progress we cannot go back in time and go collect more data on these incidents what we can do is
5:04
look for look at look up you know and and the galileo observatory under my leadership built
5:09
three observatories that are collecting data of me on millions of objects using artificial
5:14
intelligence to look for outliers objects that are outside the performance envelope of human-made
5:20
technologies and we will obviously share the data once we find the an object like yes but these are
5:26
these may be rare objects you might also ask why weren't astronomers astronomers look at the sky
5:31
all the time why didn't they see this thing well usually astronomical observatories focus on a
5:36
small portion of the sky at any given time and if something flies overhead they ignore it and also
5:42
the you know the defense budget of the us is a hundred times larger than the national science
5:47
budget. So you would expect the US military intelligence to have data. Well, they seem to
5:53
have the videos because that's where the videos seem to have come from is the US military. This
5:59
seems to be very sort of US focus. So two quick questions, if you don't mind. One, what are the
6:05
other examples from around the world of sightings of this kind of phenomenon? Do we hear much about
6:12
the UAPs in Japan? Do we hear much about the UAPs in Slovenia? And second question, actually
6:18
let's ask that first. Go on, Alfie. What about the other areas? So, in fact, I participated in a
6:24
meeting of the Japanese Congress in which they discussed UAP. That was a year ago. And in fact
6:30
recently, they reported about seeing objects they cannot identify. Of course, in their case
6:36
it may be the Chinese that are spying on them but they do report about UAP and one of the members of the Galileo project is now a professor in Japan And so she very much engaged with those reports So there are definitely
6:50
UAP in other countries. The question is, I mean, many countries just don't have the bandwidth
6:55
the capacity to explore things that they cannot figure out. And they just put it aside. They have
7:02
more urgent needs or concerns. And that's usually, you know, the nature of humans, that when they
7:09
don't understand something, they just ignore it. However, as a scientist, you know, I'm intrigued
7:14
by anomalies. It's like a detective story, and I want to figure it out. Absolutely, that's your job
7:19
as a scientist to figure out what's going on. So give us, finally, to your mind, the best example
7:26
the most tantalizing example, the most confounding example of a UAP? You mean among all the files? Yeah, among everything you've ever seen
7:38
Yeah. There is nothing that cannot be explained as human-made, but I did see videos of a spherical
7:46
object that doesn't look like a drone moving in ways that are quite unusual for a drone. Okay
7:52
OK, so that was one or two videos that I saw today. But it's not convincing
7:56
I need better data to tell you that it's not human made, if it is indeed not human made
8:03
So I would say it's still work in progress. Most likely, the U.S. government has much better data because, you know, satellites that are monitoring the Earth, they have a spatial resolution of a few centimeters
8:14
they can easily take a high-resolution image of a UAP and also monitor its motion relative to features on the ground
8:22
So I'm sure the U.S. government has great data that is currently classified because it's collected by classified sensors
8:29
And maybe they know much more than we know. And I very much look forward to helping them figure things out because I'm curious
8:36
You know, I just, it's at the very least, if everything ends up being human made, then at least I helped national security
8:44
You know, my time is not wasted. This is not hallucinations. You know, these are real objects
8:50
Really appreciate your time. Thank you very much indeed for coming back on the show. Avi Loeb is a physicist and professor of science at Harvard University
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