Is there something in the water at Harvard these days?

In the latest head-scratcher from that once-prestigious Ivy League school, astrophysicist and cosmologist Avi Loeb is speculating about the possibility that UFOs could be arriving at Earth by traveling through "alternate dimensions."

Yes, really.

Avi Loeb, known for his efforts to prove we are not alone, has claimed that extraterrestrial visitors are travelling through hidden dimensions created by researchers at the CERN particle accelerator are seeking.

The accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), blasts particles are nearly the speed of light to recreate conditions of the Big Bang, with hopes of uncovering  hidden dimensions that will reveal how our universe formed.

Speaking in a new documentary, Loeb said that alien civilizations may have been developing dimension-hopping technology for billions of years.

The physicist also noted that extraterrestrials are using theoretical quantum gravity engineering to travel through 'curled' dimensions that humans can only detect in particle accelerators such as CERN.

Note: CERN hasn't found any of these alternate dimensions yet. That doesn't make it impossible; they are exploring a path that the math would appear to indicate to see if they can confirm a hypothesis; you know, doing science.

What Avi Loeb is engaging in is pure speculation.

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First, the many and varied sightings of UFOs — I believe the current term is "Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon," or UAP — are almost certainly not alien spacecraft. One has to consider the odds here, and the difficulty of transiting the mind-blowingly vast expanses of interstellar space set beside the chances of an incredibly advanced civilization having the tech to do so being in our stellar neighborhood at this particular time is just incredibly unlikely. Occam's Razor applies; there is an earth-bound explanation for these sightings in every case.

Second, the existence of the alternate dimensions Loeb describes has not been confirmed, only hypothesized. 

Now, there's nothing wrong with speculation. Avi Loeb (who appears to be a fan of the Madeleine L'Engle novel "A Wrinkle in Time") has written a couple of books on the possibility of extraterrestrial life. I've read his book on the solar-system transiting object ʻOumuamua, in which he made the case for it being a dead alien artifact. I wasn't convinced, but in this case, at least he made some plausible arguments. Now, he seems to be moving into the realm of science fiction. I've written a fair amount of science fiction myself, and one thing I can confirm about science fiction writers is the breathtaking abandon with which we just make stuff up. I'm sure some of the tech I've created for some of my work would make an actual physicist burst out laughing. 

But I'm writing fiction. Having a Harvard cosmologist engage in this kind of raw speculation is something else; he is lending undeserved credence to an idea that has absolutely no evidence in support. But here is where Loeb really goes off the deep end:

Loeb also argues in the film that world governments should divert the $2 trillion a year he claims is spent on military budgets to the search for alien life.

In a world where Russia has already engaged in a war of conquest, where China is growing more bellicose by the day, and where Islamic terror groups are engaging in ever-more-savage attacks on innocent civilians, this kind of advocacy is just breathtakingly naive. Avi Loeb, being himself an Israeli citizen, really ought to know better.