Over the past several months, the staff of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee has repeatedly asked me if I am willing to testify before the United States Congress regarding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). 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 including my intended statement below.
The Galileo Project, under my leadership, will soon release unprecedented data results this week from the launch of its unique Observatory at Harvard University. Half a million objects were monitored in the sky and their appearance was analyzed using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. Are any of them UAPs and if so, what are their flight properties? Unfortunately, the chairmen of the congressional hearings chose not to hear about these scientific results or… scientific findings from our ocean expedition to the site of the first recorded meteor from interstellar space.
Stay tuned for the first comprehensive article on the commissioning data of the first Project Galileo Observatory, which will be published in the coming days. Here is my public statement.
Dear Members of the House Oversight Committee, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Rep. Mace and Chairman of the National Security Subcommittee, Rep. Grothman,
Thank you for hosting this public hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).
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, and head of Project Galileo. I chaired Harvard's astronomy department for nine years, and during my career, which began with President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as “Star Wars,” I wrote over a thousand scientific articles and eight books. In Washington, D.C., I served as a member of the President's Council on Science and Technology and chaired the Council 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 that visit us from outside the solar system. The brightness of sunlight reflected from `Oumuamua varied tenfold as the football-field-sized object toppled over every eight hours. These extreme differences in brightness suggested that `Oumuamua was pancake-shaped. This mysterious object was moving away from the Sun with no signs of comet evaporation and was moving away from Earth faster than any man-made rocket. A similar burst of sunlight reflection was detected three years later for another object, 2020 SO, which was confirmed to be a booster rocket launched by NASA in 1966.
Additionally, archival data from sensors aboard U.S. government satellites showed that on January 8, 2014, a meter-sized 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 superior to all documented meteorites in NASA's CNEOS catalog. Its interstellar origin was confirmed by the United States Space Command in an official memorandum to NASA's Science Mission Directorate dated March 1, 2022.
The anomalies exhibited by these first two ISOs made me curious as to whether any of them could have been technologically produced by an extraterrestrial (ET) NASA-like agency from a distant star.
The mysterious appearance of unknown near-Earth objects has been publicly acknowledged by U.S. government officials. Reports on the UAP by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines led to the creation of a up-to-date office under the DNI and the Department of Defense in 2022 called the Domain-Wide Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). So far, AARO's official statement reads: “To date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs to possess or reverse engineer extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or currently exist.”
There is a world in which both ET witnesses and AARO officials are straightforward. In this world, some UAPs are not recognized by US intelligence agencies, but the huge majority of them are man-made. There are data recovery and reverse engineering programs. These programs investigate crash sites of vehicles manufactured by hostile nations, and any biologics 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 the UAP are unknown to American corporations and marked as anomalous to conceal confusion regarding their earthly origins. In this world, the United States' apparent vulnerability to national security threats explains why the Department of Defense has refrained from disclosing related details. Any public admission of the unknown terrestrial origins of UAPs would serve the military interests of the hostile nations that produced them.
However, from a scientific point of view, even if one in a million objects in our sky are of extraterrestrial origin, its discovery will change the future of humanity. The U.S. government is not tasked with discovering what lies beyond the solar system. This is my day job as an astrophysicist.
Scientific data is crucial to clarifying whether some of these anomalous objects represent extraterrestrial technologies. Given the overwhelming interest from taxpayers in this opportunity, federal funding agencies such as NSF, NASA, DOE, and DoD should allocate funds for related research. We have been searching for ET radio signals for sixty-four years, but such a search is equivalent to waiting for a telephone call. Alternatively, we can also look for parcels in our backyard from a sender who may no longer be alive. Additional work is needed to understand why `Oumuamua and IM1 turned out to be anomalous compared to known rocks in the solar system. Currently, there are several million objects similar to IM1 in Earth's orbit around the Sun. With our best telescopes, we could find out whether any of them have a technological origin.
To gain better knowledge, scientists need to collect up-to-date, high-quality data. The sky and our oceans are not classified.
Project Galileo is currently operating a up-to-date observatory at Harvard University and is building two other observatories in other U.S. locations to continuously monitor the entire sky in infrared, optical, radio, and audio. We will soon publish a up-to-date research paper in which we used machine learning algorithms to check whether all half a million objects in the sky have a familiar origin. A year ago, I led a Galileo expedition to the Pacific that recovered anomalous millimeter-sized droplets from the IM1 crash site. Last month, we published a detailed, peer-reviewed article on these findings. We are currently planning a second expedition in the summer of 2025 to find larger fragments in the IM1 wreck. Also in 2025, NSF's Rubin Observatory in Chile will operate a 3.2-gigapixel camera to survey the entire southern sky every four days. Our scientists will look for objects resembling Oumuamua and UAP in the data stream.
A common question is, “Can humanity handle the truth?” I consider this question irrelevant, because it is always worth knowing the truth about our cosmic neighborhood. Humanity underwent a similar learning when Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei concluded from scientific evidence that we are not at the physical center of the Universe. Today, this knowledge allows NASA to reach other planets. We would never have reached these planets if we had assumed that they orbited the Earth.
On February 18, 2024, I gave a public lecture in Toruń, the birthplace of Nicolaus Copernicus, during the official celebration of the 550th anniversary of his birth. The title of my lecture was “The Next Copernican Revolution,” which might suggest that we are not at the intellectual center of the Universe. In this case, extraterrestrials may serve as better role models for a successful future than our elected officials. Two days earlier, I gave a presentation on the scientific search for extraterrestrial technological civilizations at the 2024 Munich Security Conference. Scheduling these events back-to-back highlights two aspects of UAPs and unidentified underwater objects (USOs) that carry crucial implications for both national security and our place in the Universe.
We hope that federal funding will go toward scientific research that answers open questions about national security and extraterrestrials. We owe the public's answers on both fronts.
Thank you very much for your attention.
Image Source: Pixabay.com
