Cosmic Discoveries by National-Security Sensors
National security concerns focus down to Earth. Cosmic discoveries focus on what lies far from Earth. Naively, they have nothing in common. But as the U.S. Government invests in state-of-the-art sensors for national security purposes, it sometimes detects an unexpected signal from the Universe and advances the frontiers of science. Below are three recent examples.
The first example relates to the early 1960s. At that time, the U.S. Air Force and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later DARPA), developed the Vela satellite program to verify compliance of the Soviet Union with the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, underwater, and in space. The U.S. needed a way to catch the Soviet Union cheating through the detonation of nuclear warheads in space where ground-based seismic and acoustic detectors could not pick them up.
Each Vela satellite included gamma-ray sensors designed to detect the characteristic radiation flash of a nuclear explosion. The satellites were launched in pairs to about a third of the distance to the Moon, and positioned so that each pair could triangulate the location of any detected event by comparing arrival times between the two satellites. The first pair launched in October 1963, with progressively more capable satellites through the late 1960s.
On July 2, 1967, the Vela 4 satellite pair detected a burst of gamma radiation that looked nothing like a nuclear explosion. It was too bright, too short, and had the wrong spectral shape as no nuclear weapon produces gamma rays with these characteristics. The Los Alamos scientists Ray Klebesadel, Roy Olson, and Ian Strong, catalogued the event and kept looking. Over the following years they found sixteen more similar events in the archived Vela data, occurring at random times and from random directions in the sky. They published their findings in a 1973 paper, titled “Observations of Gamma-Ray Bursts of Cosmic Origin” in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, announcing the discovery of new astronomical sources. The delay between 1967 and 1973 was partly due to the classified nature of the Vela program as the data could not be published until the relevant records were declassified.
The Gamma-ray localization was not sufficiently accurate to associate them with counterparts at known distances. On February 28, 1997 the Italian-Dutch Beppo-SAX satellite detected an X-ray afterglow from the burst GRB 970228 with a small angular uncertainty. When ground-based optical telescopes pointed at the BeppoSAX sky position, they detected a fading optical counterpart. When they measured its spectrum, they found a redshift of z ≈ 0.695, implying that the burst occurred at a cosmological distance, billions of light-years away. Subsequently, long-duration gamma-ray bursts (lasting more than a few seconds) were associated with the collapse of the core of a massive star to a black hole. As material spirals towards the black hole, it launches two opposing jets near the speed of light. Each jet drills a hole in the envelope of the stellar progenitor and emits a flash of gamma-rays for an observer aligned with its direction. In retrospect, the Vela satellites discovered the birth of black holes at the edge of the Universe while seeking the signatures of Soviet atomic detonations near Earth.
Subsequently, in the early 1970s the U.S. government started the Defense Support Program, a constellation of large infrared-sensing satellites in geostationary orbits at an altitude of about 35,786 kilometers, operated by the Air Force Space Command. Each satellite carried a large telescope with an infrared focal plane array, spinning about 6 times per minute to scan the Earth’s surface and atmosphere below. The primary mission was to detect the intense infrared plume of a ballistic missile launch within seconds of liftoff, so as to provide an early warning of a missile threat. The same sensors were sensitive enough to detect the fireballs generated by the friction of meter-scale bolides in the upper atmosphere. Every year, there is a meteor fireball with an energy output comparable to the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
The meteor data from these satellites were declassified and shared with NASA. A successor Space-Based Infrared System began in the 2000s and reached full operational capability around 2018. By now, it contains six satellites in geostationary orbit carrying both a scanning sensor and a staring sensor fixed on a region for higher sensitivity and resolution. The combination gives far better discrimination between a missile launch and other heat sources, and far better bolide characterization. The system also includes infrared sensor packages hosted on Highly Elliptical Orbit satellites (specifically on classified host vehicles in Molniya-type orbits), which provide coverage of the polar regions that geostationary satellites cannot see well from their equatorial vantage points.
Thanks to these recent improvements, I discovered recently an interstellar meteor from April 1, 2026 that arrived in the polar direction (as described in a paper here, that I co-authored with my postdoc Richard Cloete). I have found this meteor in the fireball catalog of CNEOS (the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA/JPL) while searching for data on the Boston meteor from May 30th, 2026. This constitutes a second example of data collected by national security sensor and making a cosmic discovery, this time of interstellar objects from outside the Solar System.
My third example involves Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), discovered by military cameras and sensors and reported in the latest disclosure batches released by the Pentagon on May 8, May 22 and June 12, 2026. The latest file release includes a report (accessible here) dated June 5, 2026, signed by Dr. Jon Kosloski — director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in the Pentagon. The report mentions that during two days in October 2023, law-enforcement officials noticed anomalous phenomena including an orange “mother” orb launching smaller red orbs. About 40% of the reported phenomena in this event lack a reasonable explanation and remain unresolved.
As chair of the UAP Science Advisory Council to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, AARO, the White House, the FBI and the Intelligence Community, I hope to find out whether any of these UAP might represent non-human-made technology. The existence of such an object would constitute the biggest cosmic discovery ever made by the U.S. Government, with major implications for the future of humanity
As I told the national security person who invited me to lead this Council: “Keep your common sense down to Earth and your inspiration from the cosmos.”
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In this essay, I featured six amazing watercolors from a series created by the celebrated artist, Greg Wyatt. They include insights from Dante Alihieri, Confucius, Marcus Tullius Cicero and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This is the 21st in a sequence of essays, where Greg and I collaborate on the interface between art and science. The first essay in this series, titled “Music of the Cosmic Spheres,” appeared here; the second essay, titled: “Cosmic Waterfalls in Spacetime Cliffs,” appeared here; the third titled “Missing Elements in the Cosmic Jigsaw Puzzle,” appeared here; the fourth essay, titled: “Why Do We Exist?”, appeared here, and the fifth titled “Inspiration from the Stars”, appeared here, the sixth titled: “We Might Understand How the Cosmos Works Before We Understand How Life Works”, appeared here, the seventh titled: “Will the Human Survive for Billions of Years”, appeared here, the eighth titled: “The Butterfly Effect of Intelligence in the Cosmos”, appeared here, the ninth titled: “Benefits of Extraterrestrial Intelligence over AI”, appeared here, the tenth titled: “Übermenschen on Exoplanets” appeared here, the 11th titled: “If You Had an Infinite Research Budget, How Would You Allocate It?” appeared here, the 12th titled: “Are Human-Made Objects Orbiting Earth?” appeared here, the 13th titled: “Lets Send AI Astronauts, Not Humans, to the Moon”, appeared here, the 14th titled: “Our Highest Priority Should be National Innovation Centers to Complement AI Data Centers” appeared here, the 15th titled “The Cosmic Shells That Seeded Life” appeared here, the 16th titled “Chasing Alien Mysteries in the Sky” appeared here, the 18th titled: “The Smartest Investments in Our Future Are in Space” appeared here, the 19th titled: “The Best and Worst Are Yet to Come”, appeared here, and the 20th titled “Would Alien Visitors Possess Intelligence Based on Silicon Chips or Synthetic Biology?” appeared here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is chair of the UAP Science Advisory Council to the White House, Pentagon, FBI and intelligence agencies, director 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, 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.
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