The Galileo Project in search for extraterrestrial artifacts is marking a new important milestone: triangulation.
Within each of the Galileo observatories in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Nevada, our research team plans to establish three, well-separated observing units that are looking at each object in the sky from different directions. The resulting parallax, namely the relative shift in position angle of each object from different observing points, will allow us to infer the object’s distance, velocity and acceleration.
Without parallax, our machine-learning algorithms can only identify 97% of the millions of objects that the Galileo Observatories detect. But with triangulation, we should be able to isolate real outliers which move outside the performance envelopes of human-made technologies, if they exist. This could resolve the nature of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) that the director of national intelligence described in multiple reports and that the All-Doman Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in the Pentagon aims to identify. On May 1, 2025, I proposed to congress to establish a focused scientific research program that will attract the best scientists in the world to work on the challenge of identifying UAPs.
The ability to gauge the distance of a predator by parallax is the reason we have two eyes. Since the fittest survives through natural selection, two eyes are better than one. But why not have three eyes, with the third protecting us against a threat from above or behind? As it turns out, the Tuatara, a lizard that lives on remote islands near New Zealand, has an extra eye at the top of its head.
In a new paper, paleontologists have discovered over five dozen fossils of a tiny three-eyed predator nicknamed the “sea moth” that swam in Earth’s oceans 506 million years ago, during the Cambrian period. The species is known as Mosura fentoni, belonging to a group called radiodonts, an early offshoot of the arthropod evolutionary tree. While radiodonts are now extinct, studying their fossilized remains explains how modern arthropods such as insects, spiders and crabs evolved. Arthropods are believed to account for more than 80% of living animal species. The three-eyed creature was about the length of a finger, with a circular mouth lined with teeth, flaps on both sides of its body for swimming, and claws extending from its head.
For the purpose of survival, the more eyes, the better. The lamprey fish has four eyes. Some spiders, like the Jumping Spider, have eight eyes. The box jellyfish has 24 eyes that possess a retina, cornea and lens. Scallops have up to 200 eyes all the way around the edge of their mantle, lining up against their shell. The concave mirror of each scallop eye is tiled with millions of square mirror tiles, reflecting light into two retinas on each eye, similar in architecture to human-made telescopes.
What is the largest number of vision organs that terrestrial animals possess?
The Tabanus, a species of the horsefly, have two compound eyes that contain the largest number of individual lenses. The visual units of compound eyes are called ommatidia, allowing them to have a nearly 360-degree field of vision. The number of ommatidia in insect eyes can vary from tens to tens of thousands. One paper counted 29,247 ommatidia for the dragonfly Anax junius, a few times more than the mantis shrimp Odontodactylus scyllarus. The chiton, a marine mollusk, also has thousands of lenses.
How many eyes do aliens have? We will only know the answer after our first date with them. To remain open-minded, we might want to look through a photo album of terrestrial animals with multiple eyes as our training data set. Irrespective of what we encounter on our first date with extraterrestrials, we should not judge their beauty. After all, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, irrespective of the number of eyes used to assess it.
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.
