On the Role of Belief in Science - Avi Loeb – Medium

5 min readOct 4, 2026--Press enter or click to view image in full sizeA Lamborghini worth a million dollars waiting for the hotel guest who owns it. (Image credit: Avi Loeb, October 2, 2026)On the sidewall of the dining hall in Lyn Lear’s magnificent home, there is a large blackboard taken out of the office of a physicist and framed by her into art. Open-minded science at its best is a work of art. Alongside this art, Lyn graciously hosted dinner for a group of us, including myself and three other open-minded members of the UAP Science Advisory Council: Peter Skafish, Garry Nolan and Ryan Graves. Each of us described complementary experiences with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) in preparation for a highly anticipated salon to be hosted at the home of the visionary Peter Diamandis the following day. As I returned to my hotel, I noticed a UAP at the entrance and asked the bellboy: “What is this anomalous vehicle?” He replied “A Lamborghini worth a million dollars. It arrived here two days ago and the owner had not shown up yet to drive it.” This reminded me of some of the UAP stories I heard over dinner about intact alien spacecraft in the custody of humans.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.

Milky Way’s first microblazar candidate sits 12,000 light-years away, offering a rare ground-level lab for studying relativistic jetsA black hole 12,000 light-years away is firing a jet of plasma almost directly toward Earth. At that distance, no known or expected danger to Earth has been identified by the researchers or the institutions involved. What astronomers have actually found is rarer and more interesting than a threat. Researchers have identified IRAS 18293-0941 as a compelling candidate for the Milky Way’s first microblazar, a class of object that gives astrophysicists a close-up laboratory for studying some of the most violent physics in the galaxy. What Astronomers FoundThe discovery centers on a binary system whose black hole expels plasma jets at close to three-quarters the speed of light, pointed almost directly toward Earth. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a black hole that completes a full orbit roughly every 11.38 days. Material drawn from the companion star feeds the black hole, and some of that matter gets expelled outward as opposing jets traveling at approximately three-quarters the speed of light. Terminology matters here.

Forests that stood on Mozambique's coast thousands of years ago now lie beneath shallow seas, and they have become fish-filled "peat reefs" with marine life comparable to coral reefs, researchers report in Scientific Reports. A team from the Bazaruto Center for Scientific Studies (BCSS) Ocean Observatory, led by Mario Lebrato, documented the submerged peat in the Bazaruto Archipelago in the Western Indian Ocean. BCSS, founded in 2017, describes itself as Africa's first permanent ocean observatory. Working with universities and institutions in the U. K., U. S. and Canada, the team believes it has carried out the first ecological study of peat reefs anywhere in the tropics. Old forests, new seafloorRadiocarbon dating shows the peat formed between about 300 and 5,000 years ago, and chemical analysis indicates it came mostly from coastal land plants and trees. Some samples contain up to 40% organic carbon by dry weight. Lebrato said the coastline has very little natural hard seabed, mostly shifting sand. As rising seas expose the old peat layers, they create rare solid habitat where marine life can settle, hide and feed.