Commissioning Data on Half a Million Objects in the Sky from the Galileo Project Observatory: Are Any of Them UAP?

Left: Mechanical design drawing of the infrared camera array (Dalek). Right: A photograph of the real Dalek array at the Observatory. (Image credit: Galileo Project)

After 3.5 years of planning, hardware assembly, data collection and analysis, the Galileo Project (GP) under my leadership released the commissioning data from its first Observatory at Harvard University in a new paper posted here (currently under peer review), with my GP postdoc Dr. Laura Domine as first author.

A collection of sensors in the Galileo Project Observatory at Harvard University monitor the entire sky in the infrared, optical, radio and audio.

The GP Observatory is the first of its kind. Common astronomical observatories focus on a small portion of the sky at any given time, seeking sources at great distances and ignoring objects flying overhead. The GP research team came up with an original design of an array of sensors that monitor the entire sky at all times and collect infrared, optical, radio, magnetic and audio data. Altogether, the GP Observatory is recording a continuous movie of the sky. The data is uploaded to a computer system and subsequently analyzed by machine-learning algorithms. The computer software is optimized to identify outliers among familiar insects, birds, leaves, clouds, balloons, drones, airplanes and satellites that appear in the data stream.

The Galileo Project was inaugurated on July 26, 2021. It took two years for our exceptional research team to design and assemble the hardware components, another half a year to calibrate the instruments and a full year to analyze the preliminary commissioning data, collected from January through May 2024. This data contains half a million objects, observed during these 5 months. The GP team is currently in the process of establishing two additional observatories in other locations, with the goal of tripling its data collection rate within the next six months.

The workhorse of the uniquely designed GP Observatories is called Dalek, an array of eight uncooled infrared cameras placed on half a sphere, resembling the head of the fictional robot character R2-D2 in the film Star Wars.

The puzzling appearance of unfamiliar objects close to Earth was admitted publicly by U.S. government officials. Reports on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) 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.”

As of now, there is little publicly available scientific data on UAP with flight characteristics that lie outside the performance envelope of known phenomena. The GP Observatories offer an array of multi-modal, multi-spectral sensors that continuously monitor the sky and acquire UAP data via a rigorous long-term census of all aerial phenomena to check for any object that may not be of terrestrial origin.

In addition to performing intrinsic and thermal calibrations, Dalek was commissioned through a novel extrinsic calibration method. Airplane positions from Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) data was collected by the GP radio sensor. Using machine learning software, such as You Only Look Once (YOLO) model for object detection and Simple Online and Realtime Tracking (SORT) algorithm for trajectory reconstruction, the GP team established a baseline for assessing the performance of the GP Observatory over five months of field operation.

Using an automatically generated data set derived from ADS-B-data, a dataset of synthetic three-dimensional trajectories, and a hand-labelled real-world dataset, the GP team found an acceptance rate (fraction of airplanes passing in the effective field of view of at least one camera that are recorded) of 41% for ADS-B equipped aircraft, and a mean frame-by-frame aircraft detection efficiency (fraction of recorded airplanes in individual frames which are successfully detected) of 36%. The detection efficiency depends on weather conditions, distance and object size.

Left: Examples of reconstructed trajectory data points. Right: For each corresponding reconstructed object, the GP research team overlayed three snapshots of the frame-by-frame object YOLO detections, inside green outlines and annotated with red text. The snapshots are taken and located at the start, middle and end of each trajectory.

Approximately half a million trajectories of aerial objects were reconstructed during the five months observing period. These trajectories were analyzed with an outlier search algorithm. About 16% of the monitored trajectories were flagged as outliers and manually examined. From these 80,000 outliers, 144 trajectories remained ambiguous. These are likely mundane objects but cannot be further identified without distance information. The observed count of ambiguous outliers combined with systematic uncertainties yields an upper limit of 18,271 outliers for the five-month observing period at a 95% confidence level.

Fraction of aircrafts in-range which are detected, for each Dalek camera and spatial location in the camera image frame. Each bin represents an area of size 80x64 pixels in the original camera image. (Image credit: Galileo Project)

The main limitation of the commissioning data analysis stems from not knowing the distances to the objects that were monitored. In the coming months, the GP team plans to use multiple Dalek units separated by a few miles, to measure the distance of aerial objects by observing them from different directions. Similarly, humans have two eyes because stereoscopic vision was favored by natural selection in allowing them to assess the distance of predators.

Following these commissioning results, as reported in the exciting paper available here, the GP research team is now working around the clock on a series of additional papers, including a better analysis of outliers identified by our Observatory.

First row: Flocks of birds and the Moon. Second row: Airplanes and single birds. Third row: Clouds.

A public hearing in the U.S. Congress titled, “UAP: Exposing the Truth,” will be broadcasted live here at 11:30AM Eastern Time on Wednesday, November 13, 2024. When watching it, we must keep in mind that politicians master national security but not interstellar matters.

What lies outside the Solar system happens to be my day job and the research focus of the Galileo Project. Rather than rely on hearsay testimonies about classified information, the GP research team aims to follow evidence from its sensors wherever it leads, and share the data openly with the public. This standard scientific practice is far more informative than political maneuvers aimed to disclose classified information from stubborn government agencies. A robust answer to Fermi’s old question “where is everybody?” will originate from scientists, not from politicians or journalists.

For related GP papers, click here

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)

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.