An Inspiring Visit of Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna to Avi Loeb’s Office at the Harvard College Observatory
After sitting together side-to-side on the `observers seat’ of the historical Great Refractor telescope from 1843, congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna and I walked around the display of the women “computers” of the Harvard College Observatory who pioneered major discoveries in Astronomy over a century ago. They included Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who discovered the luminosity-period relation of pulsating Cepheid stars. Measuring the pulsation period of these stars allowed to determine their distance, just like reading off the label of a 100-Watt light bulb and knowing how far the bulb is based on its observed brightness. This, in turn, enabled Edwin Hubble a century ago to measure the proportionality constant between the recession speed of distant galaxies and their distance, implying that the Universe is expanding and that it started in a Big Bang. The inverse of the Hubble constant provides an estimate for how long ago all galaxies were on top of each other, namely the age of the Universe.
This tour was the conclusion of a 90-minute visit by Representative Luna and her affiliates to my office at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A few minutes before she entered the building, the Harvard police officer who escorted her told me that he is a great supporter of Representative Luna and that his son works for the Trump administration.
The meeting in my office included presentations of the latest experimental results from the Galileo Project, a scientific search for extraterrestrial technological artifacts near Earth. Congresswoman Luna leads the congressional Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and requested recently from the Pentagon the delivery of 46 specific videos of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). This followed on President Trump’s directive (posted here by the White House):
Representative Luna’s visit started with a demonstration by the Galileo Project’s chief engineer, Alex Delacroix, of the hardware used by the Galileo Project in the form of a set of infrared and visible cameras on a hemisphere, resembling R2-D2 from Star Wars, which monitor the entire sky at all times. The three Galileo Observatories in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Nevada are collecting data on millions of objects in the sky. The latest observatory in Las Vegas includes three units separated by 10 kilometers, one of which is top of Sphere, the largest entertainment center in the world. By observing objects in the sky from three different directions, the Galileo research team is able to validate their existence and infer their distance via the method of triangulation. This allows us to measure the altitude, velocity and acceleration of objects and search for outliers which deviate from the performance envelope of human-made technologies. The Galileo data analysts, Dr. Regina Sarmiento and Dr. Richard Cloete, presented the latest analysis tools and AI algorithms that search for these outliers. Representative Luna promised to help us engage the public in identifying the ground truth on which we train our AI models (as solicited here).
Finally, the renowned geochemist Professor Stein Jacobsen, who owns a home in Representative Luna’s district in Florida, and his research assistant, Dr. Eugenia Hyung, presented our latest results for the analysis of the materials retrieved from a 2023 expedition that I led to the site of the first recognized interstellar meteor in the Pacific Ocean. The meteor’s fireball was spotted by U.S. government satellites on January 8, 2014, and its interstellar origin was validated by the U.S. Space Command in an official letter to NASA (available here), following my request through the White House. About a tenth of the 850 meteoritic fragments found in the expedition had an unusual chemical and isotopic composition, indicating with a high statistical significance an origin from outside the solar system. This is the first time that materials from a massive interstellar object were analyzed in the laboratory.
The same approach can be used to test any material that is alleged to have originated from outside the Solar System. Our laboratory instruments require less than a gram of any such material in order to validate or rule out its interstellar origin.
At the end of the inspiring visit, I gave Representative Luna my book, titled “Interstellar,” which I dedicated to her with the words: “You are a brilliant star that illuminates the darkness we live through.”
Shortly after the visit ended, President Trump announced that the government UFO files will be coming out of the White House very soon (as reported here).
Yesterday, I was asked for my opinion on the White House release of files (accessible here) as well as for my review of the recent movie “Project Hail Mary” (accessible here). At the end, I noted that life is a learning experience and exploring the unknown is what makes it worthwhile.
Here’s hoping that we will learn intriguing facts from the White House release of the UFO files. I look forward to applying all the scientific knowledge that I acquired during my academic career over the past 46 years to the interpretation of these files. Whether we are alone or being visited is not a matter of opinion or belief. It must be derived from data.
Irrespective of what we learn from the upcoming disclosure, one thing is already known from my expedition to the Pacific Ocean: the training data set offered by the Universe at large is much larger than what is available to us on Earth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (2005–2026), 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.
Professional website:
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/
Social media:
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb
https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb
