Harvard physicist: A warp bubble would glow as a blinding fireball in the atmosphere – and might also offer an explanation for UAP orbs
In a new study that has not yet been peer reviewed, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and Shaun Fell, a physicist with the Applied Physics research group, calculated how a theoretical warp-drive spacecraft would affect Earth's atmosphere. According to the authors, their results could provide a scientific framework for examining the glowing spheres, so-called "orbs," that appear in materials recently released by the Pentagon, but they stress that the work proves neither the existence of extraterrestrials nor that of warp drive.
According to an August 27 report by The Debrief, the two researchers posted their study on the arXiv preprint server, and it has not yet undergone peer review. Their starting point is the 1994 model by Mexican mathematician Miguel Alcubierre, the first mathematically valid description of a warp drive. In it, the craft rests in a "bubble" while the spacetime around it is distorted, and this carries it forward. The authors worked with a sub-light-speed version of this, because faster-than-light versions still run into unresolved fundamental problems, for example they would require matter with negative energy that exists only in theory.
A blinding fireball in the atmosphere
Loeb and Fell used hydrodynamic simulations to examine what happens to the air around a warp bubble. According to their results, if the bubble passes through the atmosphere at at least five percent of the speed of light, the shock wave heats the air to staggering temperatures, and an airplane-sized bubble would radiate with a power of more than one terawatt. An observer on the ground would perceive this as two successive signals: first as direct, high-energy radiation, then as visible and ultraviolet light absorbed and re-emitted by the denser lower atmosphere, which would appear as a glow beneath the shock zone. According to Loeb, such a fireball would be easily detectable even from a great distance, and in a favorable case it could be the brightest object in the sky even during the day.
Slower bubbles, traveling at only a few times the speed of sound, would by contrast glow much more faintly. Loeb estimates that a micrometer-sized bubble at such speeds would emit roughly one kilowatt of light. Fell said that this slow regime is currently being studied.
A microscopic bubble, a huge interior
One of the strangest ideas in the study is that general relativity also allows a warp bubble whose surface is microscopic but whose interior can be arbitrarily large. This is the so-called Van Den Broeck warp drive. Fell compared it to the magic tent in the Harry Potter books, which looks ordinary from the outside but is a huge hall inside. The physicist also remarked, half-jokingly, that such a tiny but high-speed bubble would shred almost any material because of the enormous tidal forces acting within it, meaning it could in principle also function as a weapon.
What does this have to do with UAP?
Loeb cites a June 5, 2026 report by AARO, the Pentagon office dealing with UAP matters, signed by the office's director, Jon Kosloski. According to Loeb's summary, the report describes an orange sphere of material from which smaller red spheres separated, and no reasonable explanation was found for about 40 percent of the phenomena associated with that event. Asked whether these spheres could be slow warp bubbles, Loeb replied that this could only be decided experimentally.
Neither of the authors claims that the reported spheres are alien craft. According to Fell, the value of the study lies in the fact that UAP sightings can be examined within the framework of currently known physics: if such a craft existed, what trace it would leave, and what we could see of it. Gianni Martire, founder of Applied Physics, also stressed that the work proves neither the existence of warp drive nor that of extraterrestrial life.
The sober take
The study calculates the consequences of a theoretical model; it does not analyze data from observed UAP. Its main result is precisely that a fast warp bubble would appear as a fireball brighter than the Sun and visible from afar, which does not resemble the "orbs" mostly recorded as faint, small lights. By the authors' own account, the slow regime that fits UAP cases better is still only being studied, so the connection is for now a proposal, not a result. The feasibility of faster-than-light warp drive remains unresolved in physics, and the work has not yet undergone peer review. Avi Loeb has often raised the possibility of extraterrestrial technology before, for example in connection with the interstellar object ʻOumuamua, and these proposals have repeatedly sparked debate in the field.