In recent months, I have been asked several times by the staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability if I am available to testify before Congress on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). As a result, I have cleared my calendar for November 13, 2024 and prepared the following written statement. Ultimately, I was not called to testify before Congress, so I am posting my intended statement below.
The Galileo project under my leadership is poised to release unprecedented results this week from the commissioning data of its unique observatory at Harvard University. Half a million objects were monitored in the sky and their appearance was analyzed by state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. Are these UAPs and if so, what are their flight characteristics? Unfortunately, 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 comprehensive article on the commissioning details of the first Galileo Project Observatory, which will be posted publicly in the coming days. Here is my public statement.
Distinguished Members of the House Oversight Committee, Chairman of the Cyber Subcommittee, Representative Mace and Chairman of the National Security Subcommittee, Representative 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 Harvard’s Astronomy Department for nine years and wrote more than a thousand scientific articles and eight books during my scholarly career, which began with work on President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as “Star Wars.” In Washington, DC, I served on the President’s Council of Science and Technology and chaired the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies.
After the discovery of the first interstellar object (ISO), `Oumuamua, on October 19, 2017, I became interested in the scientific study of anomalous objects visiting us from outside the solar system. The brightness of the sunlight reflected from ‘Oumuamua changed by a factor of ten as this football field-sized 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 with no signs of cometary evaporation, retreating from Earth faster than any man-made rocket. A similar pulse from reflection of sunlight was detected three years later for another object, 2020 SO, which was verified to be a rocket booster from a 1966 NASA launch.
In addition, archival data from sensors aboard US government satellites indicated that on January 8, 2014, a three-foot-sized object from outside the solar system collided with Earth. The bolide, named IM1, moved faster relative to the Sun than 95% of nearby stars and exhibited material strength beyond any documented meteorite in NASA’s CNEOS catalog. Its interstellar origin was confirmed by the US Space Command in an official memorandum to NASA’s Science Mission Directorate dated March 1, 2022.
The anomalies exhibited by these first two ISOs piqued my curiosity as to whether any of these could have been technologically manufactured by an extraterrestrial (ET) NASA-like agency from a distant star.
The mysterious appearance of unknown objects close to Earth was publicly admitted by US government officials. Reports on UAPs from Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Avril Haines, led to the creation of a new office under DNI and the Department of Defense in 2022, called the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). AARO’s official statement so far reads: “To date, AARO has discovered no verifiable information to support claims that any programs involving the possession or reverse engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or currently exist. ”
There is a world where both ET-related witnesses and AARO officials are sincere. In that world, some UAPs are not recognized by the US national intelligence community, but the vast majority of them are man-made. Retrieval and reverse engineering programs exist. These programs study crash sites of vehicles produced by hostile countries, and any biological agents recovered are of terrestrial 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 American companies and are labeled as anomalous just to cover up the confusion about their terrestrial origins. In that world, the US’s apparent vulnerability to national security threats explains why the Defense Department would withhold disclosure of related details. Any public recognition of the unknown terrestrial origins of UAPs would serve the military interests of enemy nations that produced them.
But from a scientific perspective, its discovery will change the future of humanity, even if one in a million objects in our sky is of extraterrestrial origin. The US government is not in the business of discovering what lies beyond the solar system. This is my day job as an astrophysicist.
Quality scientific data is critical to clarifying whether some of these anomalous objects represent extraterrestrial technologies. Given the tremendous interest from taxpayers in this opportunity, 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 can also search our backyard for packages from a sender who may no longer be alive. Additional research is needed to understand why `Oumuamua and IM1 appeared anomalous from known solar system rocks. There are currently a few million IM1-like objects in Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Using our best telescopes we can find out if any of these are of technological origin.
To gain better knowledge, scientists must collect new, high-quality data. The air and our oceans are unclassified.
The Galileo Project is currently operating a new observatory at Harvard University and building two other observatories at other US locations to continuously monitor the entire sky in infrared, optical, radio and audio. We’re about to release a new scientific paper, in which we used machine learning algorithms to check that half a million objects in the sky are all of known origin. A year ago, I led a Galileo project expedition to the Pacific Ocean, recovering anomalous millimeter-sized droplets from the IM1 crash site. Last month we published a detailed peer-reviewed article about these findings. We are currently planning a second expedition in the summer of 2025 to find larger pieces in the IM1 wreckage. Also in 2025, NSF’s Rubin Observatory in Chile will use a 3.2 gigapixel camera to survey the entire southern sky every four days. Our scientists will search the data stream for ‘Oumuamua-like objects and UAPs.
A common question is: “can humanity handle the truth?” I consider this question irrelevant, because it is always useful to know the truth about our cosmic environment. Humanity went through a similar learning experience when Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei used scientific evidence to conclude 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 they moved around Earth.
On February 18, 2024, I gave a public lecture in Torun, Poland, the birthplace of Nicolaus Copernicus, during an official celebration of 550 years of 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, aliens could serve as better role models for a prosperous future than our elected officials. Two days earlier, I gave a presentation at the 2024 Munich Security Conference on the scientific search for extraterrestrial technological civilizations. The sequential planning of these events points to the two facets of UAPs and Unidentified Submerged Objects (USOs), which carry important implications for national security or our place in the universe.
We hope that federal funding will be allocated to scientific research that will answer open questions about national security and aliens. We owe the public the answers on both fronts.
Thank you very much for your attention.
