The Galileo Project
It was launched in 2021 by Harvard University astrophysicist, Avi Loeb, shortly after the ODNI UFO report (prepared by the U.S. Intelligence), which reported sightings of aircraft or other devices apparently flying at mysterious speeds or trajectories, and a 3 June 2021 speech by the head of NASA, Bill Nelson, in which he stated scientific analysis of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena detected by a multitude of instruments was needed.
[1][2][4][5] The non-profit project is searching for extraterrestrial technological equipment, which can be considered to be technosignatures, including gathering new data about peculiar UFOs with dedicated optimized unclassified sensor systems.
"[2][14][15][16] The project uses an agnostic (or "secular"[7] or "unbiased, empirical inquiry")[17][18] approach by which no potential explanations – including those that are considered to be unlikely by some experts – are rejected a priori but data is gathered and scientifically investigated to, based on the results, develop any conclusions.
[19][20][5] Its two other main avenues of research are searching for "two further types of potential extraterrestrial technological signatures with the use of AI": 'Oumuamua-like interstellar objects, and non-manmade artificial satellites.
[11] One project aims to construct a series of optical and infrared telescopes to monitor the sky and use artificial intelligence to classify and analyse the observations.
[30][clarification needed] The telescope systems use machine learning to sort out, for example, "birds, balloons, drones, atmospheric events, aircraft and satellites from more mysterious sightings".
[11][39] They intend to use astronomical surveys like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory so that such objects can be identified more quickly, and to design a space mission so a probe could intercept it and gather close-up data.
[18] It is thought that when the observatory commences its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), "it will be able to detect ISOs entering our Solar System at a rate of a few per month".
[40] The project may trace its origins back to 2017 when its founder, Loeb, first got excited about the topic and gained substantial public attention after the first known interstellar object, ’Oumuamua, was discovered and displayed highly unusual properties and behavior.
[45][46][47] Loeb announced that private philanthropists were funding an expedition to search the floor in the suspected region of impact[48] by dragging a magnetic sled on the seafloor off the coast of Papua New Guinea.
[56] The broader scientific community remained skeptical of all the associated claims, from whether the meteor was interstellar, to whether it landed in that part of the ocean, to whether fragments could be recovered, to whether or not those specific objects found were of off earth origin.
[11][59] An object in a geosynchronous orbit may have been there for many millions of years and both intact material, as well as debris from degraded probes, could be detected even if they have undergone multiple collisions during this period.
[1][28][64] Loeb has pointed out that research of dark matter is a still unsolved topic that he suggests to be "just as bizarre as aliens and far less relevant to daily human life"[15] and that $100 million are only two percent of the Large Hadron Collider's "$5bn budget" and an even smaller fraction of Elon Musk's SpaceX project "valued at around $100bn".
[64] Nonetheless, on August 24, 2023, The New York Times published an article about Loeb and his related search for signs of extraterrestrial life and The Galileo Project.
