In a recent interview with the journalist John S. Lewinski, I was asked how do I maintain a stable scientific posture on the topic of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), which is so polarizing for believers and skeptics.
First, I explained the context. Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, submitted three reports to the U.S. Congress over the past three years, in which she disclosed the existence of objects in the sky whose nature is unclear, labeled as UAPs.
Obviously, there is an abundance of human-made objects in the sky, including balloons, drones, airplanes and satellites, as well as space objects falling down to Earth, such as meteors or debris from broken satellites. The U.S. military budget accounts for 38% of the global worldwide expenditure of 2.44 trillion dollars. As a result, the U.S. must have more data on UAPs than any other nation.
The discussion is complicated by the fact that leading nations are developing flying objects based on technologies of the future. These advanced objects could appear to the public as UAPs, when engaged in covert operations. In order to hide these secretive capabilities, the military-industrial complex would prefer to inject unsubstantiated fantasies about extraterrestrial visits to the public discourse, and by that confuse and discredit reports from innocent spectators who happen to observe classified technologies by chance. With out-of-this-world interpretations, eyewitness testimonies are dismissed by debunkers and the conversation is clouded by disbelief. Similarly, a government program associated with the retrieval and reverse engineering of materials collected in crash sites of objects manufactured by adversarial nations could be labeled as being focused on extraterrestrials to confuse foreign intelligence agencies. In order to separate facts from fiction, one needs to see material evidence that supports the sincere eyewitness testimony about such a UAP program, provided under oath by David Grusch a year ago, on July 26, 2023.
The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) at the Pentagon concluded recently that 97% of historic UAP reports from the military can be explained as having a “down to Earth” origin. While this may appear as an impressive account from a national security perspective, it does not address the core scientific question of whether one in a million objects on the sky might be extraterrestrial in origin.
The only scientifically responsible way to address this question is by constructing dedicated, well-calibrated observatories that monitor the entire sky at all times from a large number of locations. The data stream would identify familiar objects as background and would quantify statistically how rare a UAP is in terms of its trajectory or physical properties. This is the rationale behind the Galileo Project. The sky is not classified.
By now, the Galileo Project observatory at Harvard University observed the entire sky near Boston, Massachusetts for 8 months and collected data on about 100,000 objects each month. The Galileo research team is currently analyzing the data with Machine Learning software. So far, the preliminary analysis of the limited data collected thus far does not reveal UAPs. The Galileo Project is currently in the process of constructing two additional observatories, one in Colorado and another in Pennsylvania, with the hope of getting data on millions of objects in the coming year. Within a decade, our cumulative scientific data could improve statistical constraints on the occurrence rate of UAPs by a factor of a million compared to AARO’s report.
Having a large number of cell phone cameras does not help in detecting rare or faint objects, for the same reason that 8 billion people cannot see with their bare eyes the first galaxies at cosmic dawn. Space is vast and faint sources of light can only be detected with expensive equipment, such as the Webb telescope at a price tag of ten billion U.S. dollars. Conventional astronomical observatories focus on a small part of the sky at any given time and often ignore objects that fly at a low altitude. We can search for extraterrestrial “keys” under the bright lamppost of the Sun. But even at distances comparable to the Earth-Sun separation, our best survey telescopes like Pan-STARRS in Hawaii or the forthcoming Rubin Observatory in Chile, are sensitive to reflected sunlight from objects larger than Starship, the biggest rocket ever built by humans. Much smaller objects, such as interstellar CubeSats, can only be detected very close to Earth or if they burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere like meteors. The detection of the interstellar meteor, IM1, by U.S. government satellites, suggests that there are about a million interstellar objects of meter size within the Earth-Sun separation at any given time. Since we cannot observe them, we simply do not know whether there is technological debris from extraterrestrial civilizations among the vast collection of interstellar rocks. The unknown unknowns leave open the possibility of extraterrestrial functioning devices near Earth.
The scientific research required to address this question is challenged by a fierce debate between skeptics and believers who have strong opinions but are not engaged in the difficult work of collecting new data. Some of the skeptics call themselves “scientists” or “astrophysicists”, even though their record shows that they did not publish a single scientific paper in the past decade. They aspire to protect science without engaging in the scientific process of collecting and analyzing data. This is akin to book critics who pretend to be writers and aim to protect the literary profession by criticizing actual writers. The claims of these skeptics empower believers to do the same with the opposite point of view, creating polarization as extreme as that prevalent in politics. A scientist like myself, who is willing to put in the extensive work required to lead the Galileo Project, is exposed to personal attacks from both sides.
These circumstances are challenging for two reasons: first because both skeptics and believers are worried that new data would violate their prejudice, and second because establishing an experimental framework and collecting scientific evidence requires much more work, time and money than having an opinion.
The challenge comes with the territory when addressing a scientific question that is of great interest to the public. A thousand years ago, many believed that the human body should not be dissected in order not to hurt the soul embedded in it. As much as medical operations were controversial at that time, the courage of scientists to open the human body established the foundation for modern medicine which has saved many lives since then.
Is science simpler than politics? It is only easy to separate science from politics on questions that do not matter to the public.
At this point, John noted: “I agree. Thank you so much, Professor Loeb. This is all I needed to know.”
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. His new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2023.
