In a recent article about Medium. Avi Loeb, a professor at Harvard and head of the Galileo Project, which aims to find evidence of extraterrestrial life and technology, proposed a provocative idea: what if some of the unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) observed by military pilots and astronomers are not alien spacecraft, but rather remnants of an earlier civilization on Earth?
Loeb argues that the possibility of a ‘technosignature’ of a long-lost human civilization should not be dismissed without evidence.
He suggests that such a civilization could have existed before the last ice age, when sea levels were much lower and large landmasses were exposed.
“Is it possible that devastating global warming 252 million years ago was caused by industrial pollution by a technological civilization? This would require the first intelligence to have appeared just 6 percent earlier in Earth’s 4,540 million year history,” Loeb writes.
“Any technological infrastructure left on the Earth’s surface from that early civilization could have been destroyed by geological activity, including subduction, covered by water, or affected by meteor impacts and weathering.”
He speculates that this civilization could have developed advanced technology, such as aerospace engineering, and launched some of their devices into orbit or into interstellar space.
“Over the past century of modern technology, our civilization has launched many thousands of functional devices into orbit around the Earth. A more advanced or longer-lived technological civilization could have used more advanced devices. Are there unknown technological relics in our skies?
“The Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, submitted two recent reports to the United States Congress in 2022 and 2023, admitting the existence of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) whose nature is unclear, some of which are trans-medium exhibit maneuvers between air and water. . Could these relics be evidence of a civilization that existed on Earth before us 252 million years ago?” Loeb wonders.
Loeb acknowledges that his hypothesis is highly speculative and faces many challenges, such as the lack of archaeological evidence for such a civilization and the difficulty of explaining how their technology could have survived for millions of years in the harsh environment of space.
He also admits that there are other possible explanations for UAPs, such as natural phenomena, man-made artifacts or even alien visitors.
However, he argues that we should not ignore any possibility until we have conclusive data, and that we should use scientific methods and tools to gather more evidence and test different hypotheses.
