Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) tweeted President Trump and encouraged him to declassify secret government archives about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). This followed on Trump’s executive order on January 23, 2025 to declassify government records on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
President Trump directed his attorney general and director of national intelligence to give him a plan within 15 days “for the full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” as well as within 45 days “for the full and complete release” of papers related to the killings of Senator Kennedy and Dr. King.
The UAP disclosure request has bipartisan support. Senators Schumer and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act a year and a half ago that requested to declassify and disclose government records related to UAPs unless officials provide reasons for why they should remain classified.
From the U.S. government’s perspective, the fundamental question is whether these anomalous objects are human made, in which case they pose a national security threat. However, even if one in a million objects is from an extraterrestrial origin, it could inform us that we are not alone and be the biggest scientific discovery in human history.
As a scientist, I would love to have access to any data that indicates a nonhuman origin of technological objects. My day job is studying what lies outside the Solar system. I lead the Galileo Project at Harvard University, which is constructing three new observatories that are expected to track more than a million objects in the sky this year. We already published several scientific papers about our data.
It is always good to know facts about our cosmic neighborhood. In 1992 the Vatican admitted that Galileo was right and the Earth is not at the center of the Universe. Knowing that fact is clearly beneficial. We would have never reached Mars if we thought that it orbits the Earth. The time is ripe for us to know whether we are at the intellectual center of the Universe.
Based on existing astronomical data, it is likely that there are of order a hundred billion Earth-Sun analogs in the Milky-Way galaxy alone. In other words, there are numerous houses like our own in our cosmic street. The pressing question is whether any of them had residents like us over the past few billion years.
The worst-case scenario from my perspective as a curious scientist is that all anomalous objects in the government’s records are human made. This would be a boring outcome that carries no new information about our cosmic neighborhood, but is of great significance to national security.
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.
