Avi Loeb’s Statement on UAPs to the House Oversight and Accountability Committee
Over the past few months, I was asked multiple times by Staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability whether I am available to testify before the U.S. Congress on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). As a result, I cleared my calendar for November 13, 2024 and prepared the following written statement. At the end, I was not called to testify before Congress and so I am posting below my intended statement. The Galileo Project under my leadership is about to release this week unprecedented results from commissioning data of its unique Observatory at Harvard University. Half a million objects were monitored on the sky and their appearance was analyzed by state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. Are any of them UAPs and if so — what are their flight characteristics? Unfortunately, the congressional hearing chairs chose not to hear about these scientific results, nor about the scientific findings from our ocean expedition to the site of the first reported meteor from interstellar space.
Stay tuned for the first extensive paper on the commissioning data from the first Galileo Project Observatory, to be posted publicly in the coming days. Here is my public statement.
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Distinguished Members of the House Oversight Committee, Cyber Subcommittee Chair Rep. Mace and National Security Subcommittee Chair Rep. Grothman,
Thank you for holding this public hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs).
My name is Abraham (Avi) Loeb and I am the Baird Professor of Science and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard University, as well as the head of the Galileo Project. I chaired the Harvard Astronomy department for nine years and wrote more than a thousand scientific papers and eight books during my scientific career, which started with work on President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, also dubbed as “Star Wars.” In Washington DC, I served as a member of the President’s Council of Science and Technology and chaired the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies.
Following the discovery of the first interstellar object (ISO), `Oumuamua, on October 19, 2017, I became interested in the scientific study of anomalous objects that visit us from outside the Solar System. The brightness of sunlight reflected off `Oumuamua changed by a factor of ten as this football-field-size object tumbled every eight hours. These extreme brightness variations implied that `Oumuamua was shaped like a pancake. This mysterious object accelerated away from the Sun without signs of cometary evaporation, and receded from Earth faster than any human-made rocket. A similar push by reflection of sunlight was detected three years later for another object, 2020 SO, which was verified to be a rocket booster from a 1966 launch by NASA.
In addition, archival data from sensors aboard U.S. Government satellites indicated that on January 8, 2014, a meter-size object from outside the Solar System collided with Earth. The bolide, called IM1, was moving relative to the Sun faster than 95% of nearby stars and exhibited material strength beyond all documented meteorites in NASA’s CNEOS catalog. Its interstellar origin was confirmed by the U.S. Space Command in an official memorandum to NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, dated March 1, 2022.
The anomalies displayed by these first two ISOs triggered my curiosity on whether any of them might have been manufactured technologically by an extraterrestrial (ET) NASA-like agency from a distant star.
The puzzling appearance of unfamiliar objects close to Earth was admitted publicly by U.S. government officials. Reports on UAPs from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Avril Haines, led in 2022 to the establishment of a new office under DNI and the Department of Defense, called the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). The official statement from AARO so far is: “To date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”
There is a world in which both ET-related witnesses and AARO officials are sincere. In that world, some UAPs are unrecognized by U.S. National Intelligence agencies but the vast majority of them are human-made. Retrieval and reverse engineering programs do exist. These programs study crash sites of vehicles produced by adversarial nations, and any recovered biologics are terrestrial in origin. The concentration of UAPs near nuclear or military assets is a natural byproduct of espionage. Some of the advanced technologies displayed by UAPs are unknown to U.S. corporations and labeled as anomalous just to hide the confusion about their terrestrial origin. In that world, the apparent vulnerability of the U.S. to national security threats explains why the Department of Defense would suppress disclosure of related details. Any public admission on the unknown terrestrial origin of UAPs would serve the military interests of adversarial nations who produced them.
However, from a scientific perspective, even if one in a million objects in our sky is of extraterrestrial origin, its discovery will change the future of humanity. The U.S. government is not tasked to discover what lies outside the Solar System. This is my day job as an astrophysicist.
Scientific quality data is key for clarifying whether some of these anomalous objects represent extraterrestrial technologies. Given the enormous interest in this possibility by taxpayers, federal funding agencies such as NSF, NASA, DOE or DoD, should allocate funds to related scientific research. We have been searching for ET radio signals for sixty-four years, but such searches are equivalent to waiting for a phone call. Alternatively, we could also search for packages in our back yard from a sender that might not be alive anymore. Additional work is needed to understand why `Oumuamua and IM1 appeared anomalous relative to familiar rocks from the Solar System. There are currently of order a few million IM1-like objects within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. We could find out whether any of them is technological in origin using our best telescopes.
To gain better knowledge, scientists must collect new high-quality data. The sky and our oceans are not classified.
The Galileo Project is currently operating a new observatory at Harvard University and constructing two other observatories in other U.S. locations to monitor the entire sky continuously in the infrared, optical, radio and audio. We are about to release a new scientific paper, where we used machine-learning algorithms to check whether half a million objects in the sky are all of familiar origin. A year ago, I led a Galileo Project expedition to the Pacific Ocean which retrieved anomalous millimeter-size droplets from IM1’s crash site. Last month, we published a detailed peer-reviewed paper on these findings. We are currently planning a second expedition in summer 2025 to find larger pieces within the wreckage of IM1. Also in 2025, NSF’s Rubin Observatory in Chile will employ a 3.2 gigapixel camera to survey the entire southern sky every four days. Our scientists will be searching for `Oumuamua-like objects and UAPs in its data stream.
A common question is: “can humanity handle the truth?” I regard this question as irrelevant, since it is always beneficial to know the truth about our cosmic neighborhood. Humanity went through a similar learning experience when Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei used scientific evidence to infer that we are not at the physical center of the Universe. Today, this knowledge allows NASA to reach other planets. We would never reach these planets if we assumed that they move around the Earth.
On February 18, 2024, I gave a public lecture in Torun, Poland, the birth town of Nicolaus Copernicus, during an official celebration of 550 years to his birth. The title of my lecture was: “The Next Copernican Revolution,” which might imply that we are not at the intellectual center of the Universe. In that case, extraterrestrials might serve as better role models for a prosperous future than our elected officials. Two days earlier, I made a presentation about the scientific search for extraterrestrial technological civilizations at the 2024 Munich Security Conference. The back-to-back scheduling of these events signifies the two facets of UAPs and Unidentified Submerged Objects (USOs), which carry important implications for either national security or our place in the Universe.
Here’s hoping that federal funding will be allocated to scientific research that will answer open questions on national security and extraterrestrials. We owe the answers on both fronts to the public.
Thank you so much for your attention.
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.
