Avi Loeb Embraces Lost Prehistoric Civilization as Possible UFO Explanation

​In a blog post this week, Harvard astronomer and alien-hunter Avi Loeb completed his metamorphosis, achieving the final form of pop culture ufologists: He’s now into ancient mysteries and prehistory’s lost civilization secrets. Loeb announced that UFOs may be a technological relic of a lost prehistoric civilization destroyed by a geological catastrophe, with only their orbiting spacecraft to mark their passage:

Is it possible that the devastating global warming event was caused 252 million years ago by industrial pollution from a technological civilization? This would have required first intelligence to emerge only 6 percent earlier in the 4,540-million-year history of Earth.
 
Any technological infrastructure left on the surface of Earth from that early civilization could have been demolished by geological activity including subduction, covered by water or tarnished by meteor impacts and weathering.
 
However, functional relics could have been preserved in space. Within the past century of modern technology, our civilization has launched many thousands of functional devices in orbit around Earth. A more advanced or longer-lived technological civilization could have used more sophisticated devices. Are there unfamiliar technological relics in our sky?

​I think Loeb enjoyed his time on Ancient Aliens too much. He even writes like the show’s narration. Sure, Loeb is riffing on a 2019 scientific paper speculated about something similar—the so-called “Silurian hypothesis”—but here Loeb seems to actually be proposing that such a lost civilization could provide the explanation he needs for the many reasons his previous UFO speculations have all failed. Now that his “interstellar” microspherules were shown to likely be from this solar system, or even this planet, and not from other galaxies, he’s retooling his claims to preserve the mystery without conceding error. And like all faith-based speculators, he concludes with a Millennialist message, suggesting that “information recovered through government” will “elevate” humanity.
 
But the scientists behind the Silurian hypothesis recognized that some traces of a global high-tech civilization would remain, while Loeb follows Graham Hancock in imagining that some great catastrophe—a quasi-scientific version of the Great Flood of Noah—would wipe clean the Earth and make all pristine and new. The argument didn’t work for Atlantis and it won’t work for a vanished race of prehuman technologists, unless Loeb embraces the long-debunked “OOPART” claims of the creationists.
 
In the end, Loeb is moving toward the suspiciously similar Shaver Mystery, in which paranoid conspiracy-monger Richard Shaver proposed that a prehistoric non-human lost civilization that had vanished beneath the Earth had sent spaceships into orbit, and that the government was hiding the truth about it. Somehow, we keep coming back to the same science fiction of the Golden Age no matter which path ufologists stumble down.