My 20-minute presentation at the UAP congressional briefing on May 1, 2025 (of which the full video, including presentations by other panelists, is accessible here) started with the following statements.
Let us be honest: there are objects in the sky that we do not understand. When we do not understand what 85% of the matter in the universe is, we invest billions of dollars to find out the nature of that dark matter. Given that the U.S. government reports about Unidentified Anomalous Objects (UAPs), I say: let us invest a billion dollars in figuring out their nature through rigorous scientific research. If we find that all UAPs are human made, some by adversarial nations, then at the very least we will have at our possession state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and sensor systems that are of great value for national security. On the other hand, even if one in a billion of these UAPs happens to be extraterrestrial in origin, its discoverers will be awarded the Nobel prize. This is a win-win situation.
On the day before the congressional briefing, I visited the Pentagon and echoed these sentiments. If we do not find evidence for extraterrestrial technologies, I will be proud that the AI tools and sensors being developed will be used to protect our nation against human-made terrestrial threats.
The scientific study of UAP offers a unique opportunity to spend a billion dollars on AI and frontier science and make taxpayers happy. There is no bigger scientific question that the public cares about than “Are we alone?” If there are smarter kids on our cosmic block, we can learn from them.
Recovering an extraterrestrial gadget might provide us with access to advanced technologies faster than it would take us to develop them from scratch. Our current scientific knowledge is an island in an ocean of ignorance. A civilization that benefitted from millennia of science after discovering quantum mechanics, might have quantum-gravity engineers that attach a negative mass to a payload and allow it to escape gravity without fuel.
The briefing was attended by the honorable House Representatives Anna Paulina Luna, Nick Begich, Eric Burlison and Tim Burchett. I showed the cover page of a New-York Times Magazine feature story: “How a Harvard Professor Became the World’s Leading Alien Hunter?” and mentioned that I was not happy with that reporting and told the editor: if we cannot trust what you publish about science, how can we believe what you post about politics?
New scientific knowledge does not fall into our lap. I reiterated a new variant of my bet with Elon Musk, namely I am willing to put 1% of my net worth against 1% of his net worth and check whether Elon is the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.
Subsequently, I described the extensive work done by the Galileo Project team, including the construction and operation of three new UAP observatories that will collect new data on a few million objects per year by monitoring the sky in the infrared, optical, radio and audio, and searching for outliers using state-of-the-art AI software.
The Galileo Project is also planning to search for large pieces of the interstellar meteor IM1 using a robot with a video feed. I concluded with a sunset photo of me with Art Wright, who served as party chief of our first ocean expedition to retrieve spherules from IM1’s fireball site in the Pacific Ocean. Art is a problem solver, an admirable outlier in today’s culture of virtue signaling. His approach is the one I embrace for resolving the mystery of UAPs.
In a podcast interview earlier this week, I was asked: “What would you like to be remembered for?” My answer was: “For my future work. The best is yet to come.”
Many of my colleagues adopt what they regard as the voice of reason in avoiding UAPs. At the same time, they brush anomalies under the carpet, by cataloging near-Earth objects with unusual trajectories as “Empty Trash Bag Objects” — implying that they are broken pieces of human-made satellites pushed by sunlight, and by labeling anomalous interstellar objects like `Oumuamua — which exhibited a similar push away from the Sun, as “Dark Comets”.
Starting this summer, the Rubin observatory in Chile, funded by NSF and DOE, might find family members of `Oumuamua that could be studied further with the Webb telescope. Labeling anomalies with names that imply conventional interpretations and then insisting that there is nothing anomalous about them, is not a wise long-term strategy. Reality does not care about our ignorance. While most humans insisted that the Earth is at the physical center of the Universe, the Earth continued to revolve around the Sun. This was captured by the phrase attributed to Galileo Galilei: “Epour si mouve.”
Following the scientific tradition established by Galileo, we must seek more evidence in figuring out anomalies. With the investment of a billion dollars in resolving the nature of UAPs, we are likely to gain new knowledge. In reply to a question by the moderator, Lue Elizondo, I highlighted my hope that the younger generation will find the nature of UAPs out of raw curiosity and without being trapped in prejudice. This is why I am excited to construct a Galileo Project observatory in a new science education campus near Purdue University, Indiana, aimed to inspire the next generation of curious kids.
I choose every day to think like a kid and not interpret anomalies as manifestations of known things. It is not an easy choice, being surrounded by colleagues who pretend to behave like the adults in the room and insist that they know the answer in advance.
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.
