According to professor Avi Loeb, speaking on NewsNation, AARO — the Pentagon's designated UFO investigation office — admitted during his personal visit last year that the only UAP reports their staff could not explain came from FBI field agents.
What does "could not explain" even mean? Both UFO and UAP contain a "U" for "unidentified". In the case of persons, identification means being able to determine their names. In the case of projectiles or aircraft, it means, for example, being able to read their identification markings or unambiguously assign them, based on flight data, within the framework of registration with the military or civil aviation authorities.
In this sense, ʻOumuamua could not be identified, but it was characterized and given a name. Even if we may never know exactly what it was, it is now an unambiguously identifiable, registered object in space.
Why am I saying this? Loeb's statement is so vague that it leaves the aspect of identification entirely open. "Could not explain" can also mean the failure to recognize known, registered, or otherwise conventional aircraft. If "could not explain" refers instead to flight characteristics, then we are dealing with a process that lies squarely within the core competence of Metabunk. In this area, a great many sightings have in fact been explained. As is well known, however, this happens in a very gradual and incremental way.
Often the situation is quite clear, even if not identified in the strict sense. Sometimes it is both. Sometimes something can at least be explained to the extent that one can say the flight characteristics are not exotic. Often enough, it can be explained well enough to conclude, "Probably a balloon."
Please forgive me for spelling this out in such a roundabout way. My intention is precisely to illustrate how inadequate the quoted statement is, whether it originates with Loeb himself or whether it emerged in the course of being relayed in that social media post.
What frustrates me once again, as in the case of Obama, who in my view made irresponsibly careless UFO statements while the cameras were rolling despite knowing exactly how such remarks would be received by the public, is that such an under-complex statement is now coming from Harvard professor Avi Loeb. Given his entanglement with the UFO scene, he certainly knows what he is triggering with this.
Even AARO ultimately came to accept explanations that originated with Metabunk after initially ignoring them, and above all explanations publicly proposed by Mick West, after more or less official scientific institutions failed to get a handle on the issue themselves. From the context of the AARO reports, one can reasonably infer that cases such as FLIR1, Gimbal, and GOFAST are considered explainable by the agency, that is, effectively treated as explained, even if not formally identified. Yet it was acknowledged that the available data are insufficient for a definitive explanation. Loeb's statement leaves out such crucial distinctions.
In my view, that can only happen with clear intent and therefore raises suspicion of an agenda. Alternatively, it is simple carelessness. Of course professors sometimes talk nonsense. But carelessness is not what academic titles are awarded for. Am I being too strict?
