On Thursday, May 1 at 11:30AM ET, I am scheduled to give a public presentation at a bipartisan U.S. congressional briefing on “Understanding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP): Science, National Security & Innovation,” hosted by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the Task Force on the Declassification and Federal Secrets — led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna. The live-stream video will be available here. A podcaster suggested to congresswomen Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla) that they take a photo with me in the middle, to illustrate that UAP interest is bipartisan.
During my presentation, I will advocate for two facets of the scientific study of UAP. First, it is imperative to allocate funds to collect new high-quality scientific data on UAP with state-of-the-art instruments that were not available in the past. Old UAP reports, such as those recently documented in the National Archives contain limited data that cannot be verified. Since the sky and oceans are not classified, it makes more sense to collect new and better data on millions of objects. This is what the Galileo Project is currently doing under my leadership. We are assembling three observatories in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Nevada that will observe the full sky with infrared, optical, radio and audio sensors. The data is analyzed with artificial intelligence software that search for outliers with unusual appearance or flight characteristics. Our peer-reviewed paper on the first million objects imply that less than 3% of them are anomalous. Our ability to discover UAP outside the performance envelope of human-made technologies will be facilitated in the coming months, as we start operating multiple sensors separated by a few miles within each observatory. Viewing objects from multiple directions would allow us to measure their distance, speed and acceleration through triangulation. As soon as we employ triangulation, we will be able to search for truly anomalous outliers.
In addition, the Galileo Project aims to conduct a second Pacific Ocean expedition in search for large pieces in the wreckage of the interstellar meteor, IM1, spotted by U.S. government satellites in 2014. Large pieces will allow us to identify the material and structure of the original object and conclude whether it was natural or artificial in origin. So far, we identified an unusual chemical composition for 10% of the millimeter-size fragments recovered from IM1’s site. We are currently engaged in isotope analysis to check whether their relative abundances fall outside the range of Solar system materials. Since volatile elements were lost from the molten spherules during the airburst, our next expedition (contingent on finding a funder) aims to recover larger pieces that survived the fireball. In a paper with my brilliant postdoc Morgan MacLeod, I showed that the unusual chemical composition of the millimeter-size spherules that we recovered from IM1’s site could have been produced during the spaghettification of a rocky planet by dwarf star. Large pieces would help us check if a natural origin of this type is favored over a technological origin. If we are lucky to recover the core of IM1, we will easily find whether IM1 was a rock or an interstellar gadget with buttons on it.
On January 2, 2025, the Minor Planet Center announced a new asteroid labeled 2018 CN41, but less than 17 hours later an editorial notice deleted 2018 CN41 from the database since the object was not an asteroid. Also, there was no evidence for a cometary tail around it. If 2018 CN41 is not an asteroid nor a comet, what is it? As it turns out, it is a car. Specifically, it is the Tesla Roadster car, launched on February 6, 2018, as the dummy payload for the Falcon Heavy first flight. This car is now orbiting the Sun on the same eccentric orbit reported for 2018 CN41. This example raises the question of whether any of the interstellar objects in the inner Solar system are interstellar cars?
Given the broad interest of the public in UAP and interstellar objects, we should allocate billions of dollars to the scientific study of these anomalous objects. The scientific community has already allocated funds of this magnitude to the study of dark matter, without success. If we were to ask taxpayers which question is more urgent, they will likely side with UAP. If all UAP end up being human made, this conclusion would still be important for national security. A total investment of a few billion dollars is only a fraction of a percent of the annual defense budget.
The second point I will advocate in my presentation stems from what I noted in a NewsNation interview last night: “If the U.S. Government has any data or materials concerning what lies outside the Solar system, it would be my privilege to help them figure it out.” Knowing what the U.S. government has at its possession can save time for the Galileo Project research team. Government officials do not have the time nor the expertise to analyze astrophysical data.
My day job as an astrophysicist and head of the Galileo Project is to find out whether there are other resident civilizations in our cosmic neighborhood. Enrico Fermi’s question: “where is everybody?” should be answered by collecting evidence with a sense of curiosity and humility. Encountering interstellar gadgets would revive in us the sense of awe that Moses felt when witnessing the miracle of the burning bush that was not consumed. In contrast to Friedrich Nietzsche’s premature assertion: “God is dead,” encountering technological miracles manufactured by an advanced alien intelligence might suggest that “Superhumans are alive.” Despite our wishful thinking, Earth might not be the technological center of the Universe. Welcome to the next Copernican revolution.
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.
