Most of our adult life, we invent stories or believe in stories told by others, rather than seek supporting evidence for these stories. The reason is simple. Evidence-based reasoning is hard and story-telling is easy. But in the words of John F. Kennedy during his speech at Rice University in 1962 (which happens to be my birth year): “We choose to […] do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
The tendency to tell stories rather than do the hard work of collecting evidence applies also to some scientists. When I led an expedition to retrieve meteoritic materials from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean based on NASA data, some scientists published papers arguing that they do not believe the data about this meteor and that we will not find anything. Once we retrieved meteoritic materials with an anomalous chemical composition, they argued that we retrieved coal ash and probably went to the wrong place. These scientists preferred to tell stories without access to the materials we actually retrieved, instead of pursuing the hard work of evidence-based science that my research team carried out.
The attraction to story-telling is even more prevalent in the realm of politics. During my recent visit to Washington DC, I heard stories that the U.S. Government is in possession of vehicles manufactured by alien civilizations. In order to believe these stories, we must see the vehicles for the same reason that we would hesitate to buy a used car without an inspection.
A millennium ago, numerous people were willing to testify under oath with great conviction that the Earth is at the center of the Universe. A popularity poll back then would have concluded that their consistent views must be correct beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet, in 1992 even the Vatican admitted that this widely-believed story in ancient times was wrong. Yes, we can make progress in our knowledge, as long as we are curious and courageous enough to collect evidence that might contradict our preconceptions.
Gaining new knowledge requires funding for the related research effort. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary funding. The Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb, cost 2 billion dollars by 1945 — equivalent to over 30 billion dollars today. Like nuclear weapons, UAPs could represent new technologies of utmost importance for national security. Figuring out their nature deserves 3% of the Manhattan Project budget or about a billion dollars today.
In an interview by the brilliant Natasha Zouves at NewsNation last night, I argued that congress should allocate a billion dollars to a “UAP-Manhattan Project” that will develop artificial intelligence (AI) software to search for outliers among the objects detected by state-of-the-art sensors, in a nationwide effort to figure out the nature of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). Under the conservative assumption that all technological vehicles are human made, the Department of Defense will benefit from a new alert system to national security threats. We must be able to identify objects smaller than the 2023 Chinese spy balloon, and avoid the embarrassment of admitting UAPs in multiple congressional reports that were filed by the director of national intelligence in recent years. All objects in our sky must be identified in order for taxpayers to feel safe and rest assured that the trillion-dollar defense budget for Fiscal year 2026 is protecting American citizens from the drones and balloons of adversarial nations.
As the cherry on top, the UAP-Manhattan Project also holds the potential for discovering a rare extraterrestrial vehicle and answering the question: “Are we alone?” It would be unwise to invest 10 billion dollars in NASA’s Habitable World Observatory and search for microbes on distant exoplanets, without allocating 10% of this expenditure to the study of anomalous technological artifacts near Earth.
Given the potential for discovering extraterrestrial vehicles, I am confident that a UAP-Manhattan Project will attract the best minds in science to the task. The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in the Pentagon focused mostly on past data which is of limited utility because it cannot be verified. In addition, AARO does not currently employ the best and the brightest in the scientific community. The UAP-Manhattan Project will develop new AI tools for multi-modal analysis of the vast amount of data accessible with state-of-the-art cameras and multi-wavelength sensors.
With a billion dollars in funding, the UAP-Manhattan Project will collect new evidence and transform UAPs from the category of “unidentified anomalies” to that of “identified phenomena”. Getting the Nobel Prize by answering the biggest question in science would be a welcomed bonus. But at the very least, American taxpayers will sleep better at night knowing that we understand all objects flying in our sky.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
