Statement by Avi Loeb on UAPs to the House Oversight and Accountability Committee | by Avi Loeb | November 2024

Over the past few months, I have been asked several times by staff on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee whether I would be available to testify before the U.S. Congress on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs). I then cleared my calendar for November 13, 2024 and prepared the following written statement. In the end, I was not asked to testify before Congress and so I am posting my intended testimony below. The Galileo Project under my leadership will this week publish unprecedented results from the commissioning data of its unique observatory at Harvard University. Half a million objects in the sky were monitored and their appearance analyzed using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. Are they UAPs, and if so, what are their flight characteristics? Unfortunately, the congressional hearing chairs have chosen not to hear about these scientific results, nor about the science from our ocean expedition to the location of the first reported meteor from interstellar space.

Stay tuned for the first detailed article on the commissioning dates of the first Galileo project observatory, which will be published publicly in the coming days. Here is my public statement.

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Dear 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 hosting 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 and leader of the Galileo Project. I headed the astronomy department at Harvard University for nine years and wrote more than a thousand scientific papers and eight books during a scientific career that began with work on President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as “Star Wars.” In Washington DC, I was a member of the President's Council of Science and Technology and chair of 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 that visit 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 toppled every eight hours. These extreme fluctuations in brightness suggested that Oumuamua was shaped like a pancake. This mysterious object accelerated away from the Sun with no signs of meteoric evaporation, moving away from Earth faster than any human-built rocket. A similar shock from sunlight reflection was detected three years later on another object, 2020 SO, which was confirmed to be a rocket booster from a launch in 1966.

In addition, archival data from sensors aboard U.S. government satellites indicate that on January 8, 2014, a meter-sized object from outside the solar system collided with Earth. The bolide, called IM1, moved faster relative to the Sun than 95% of nearby stars and had a material thickness that exceeds any meteorite documented 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 that these first two ISOs showed piqued my curiosity as to whether one of them might have been technologically manufactured by an extraterrestrial (ET) NASA-like agency from a distant star.

The mysterious appearance of unknown near-Earth objects has been publicly acknowledged 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, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). AARO's official statement to date is: “To date, AARO has found no verifiable information to support claims that programs to possess or reverse engineer extraterrestrial material existed in the past or currently.”

There is a world in which both ET-related witnesses and AARO officials are honest. In this world, some UAPs are not recognized by the US intelligence community, but the vast majority of them are man-made. There are retrieval and reverse engineering programs. These programs examine accident scenes of vehicles manufactured by enemy nations, and all biologics recovered are of terrestrial origin. The concentration of UAPs near nuclear or military facilities is a natural byproduct of espionage. Some of the UAPs' advanced technologies are unknown to U.S. companies and are described as anomalous just to hide confusion about their terrestrial origins. In this world, the United States' apparent vulnerability to national security threats explains why the Department of Defense suppresses disclosure of related details. Any public admission of the unknown terrestrial origin of the UAPs would serve the military interests of the opposing nations that manufactured them.

But even if one in a million objects in our sky is of extraterrestrial origin, its discovery will change the future of humanity from a scientific perspective. The US government is not in the business of finding out what lies outside the solar system. This is my main job as an astrophysicist.

Scientific-quality data is key to clarifying whether some of these anomalous objects represent extraterrestrial technologies. Given the tremendous taxpayer interest in this opportunity, federal funding agencies such as NSF, NASA, DOE, or DoD should provide funding for related scientific research. We've been searching for extraterrestrial radio signals for sixty-four years, but such searches are tantamount to waiting for a call. Alternatively, we could search our backyard for packages from a sender who may no longer be alive. Further work is needed to understand why 'Oumuamua and IM1 appeared anomalous compared to known rocks from the Solar System. There are currently several million IM1-like objects in Earth's orbit around the Sun. With our best telescopes we could find out if any of them are technological in origin.

To gain better insights, scientists need to collect new, high-quality data. The skies and our oceans are unclassified.

The Galileo Project currently operates a new observatory at Harvard University and is building two additional observatories elsewhere in the United States to provide continuous infrared, optical, radio and audio monitoring of the entire sky. We are about to publish a new scientific paper in which we use machine learning algorithms to test whether half a million objects in the sky all have known origins. A year ago, I led a Galileo Project expedition to the Pacific Ocean that recovered anomalous millimeter-sized droplets from the IM1 crash site. Last month we published a detailed peer-reviewed paper on these findings. We are currently planning a second expedition in summer 2025 to find larger pieces in the IM1 debris. Also in 2025, the NSF's Ruby Observatory in Chile will deploy a 3.2 gigapixel camera every four days to survey the entire southern sky. Our scientists will search for Oumuamua-like objects and UAPs in its data stream.

A frequently asked question is: “Can humanity handle the truth?” I consider this question irrelevant since it is always beneficial to know the truth about our cosmic neighborhood. Humanity had a similar learning experience when Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei concluded, based on 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 reach these planets if we assumed that they orbited the Earth.

On February 18, 2024, I gave a public lecture in Torun, Poland, the birthplace of Nicholas Copernicus, as part of the official celebration of his 550th birthday. The title of my talk was “The Next Copernican Revolution,” which could mean that we are not at the intellectual center of the universe. In this case, aliens may serve as better role models for a successful future than our elected officials. Two days earlier, I gave a talk on the scientific search for extraterrestrial technological civilizations at the 2024 Munich Security Conference. The sequential planning of these events highlights the dual facets of UAPs and unidentified sunken objects (USOs) that have important implications for either national security or our place in the universe.

We hope that federal funding will be made available for scientific research that answers outstanding questions about national security and aliens. We owe the public the answers on both fronts.

Thank you for your attention.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Avi Loeb is leader of the Galileo Project, founding director of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and 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 past chairman 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 co-author of the textbook “Life in the cosmos“, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book entitled “Interstellar“, was published in August 2024.