The Galileo Project (Harvard, Avi Loeb)
The Galileo Project is a privately funded research program based at Harvard. Avi Loeb (Harvard astronomy) and Frank Laukien founded it in July 2021. Its aim is to search near Earth for physical objects that extraterrestrial technological civilizations might have made, either as interstellar objects or as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). It has three lines of work: (1) ground observatories that record a calibrated, multi-sensor census of everything that crosses the sky, so that outliers stand out; (2) interstellar objects such as 'Oumuamua (see oumuamua-2017); (3) the 2023 Pacific expedition to the site of the CNEOS 2014-01-08 (IM1) fireball (see im1-2014). Most of the published output is instrument and method papers, mainly a 2023 special issue of the Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation. Infrared commissioning at the Massachusetts development site reconstructed about 500,000 trajectories, and 144 of them stayed ambiguous, "likely mundane". A 2026 preprint reports triangulation from three camera sites near Las Vegas, checked against aircraft transponder (ADS-B) data. No paper read for this write-up reports an object of non-human origin.
How plausible · High
A Harvard instrument program publishing calibrated sensor data and peer-reviewed method papers; it claims no anomaly yet, so the record itself is fully plausible.
- ●●Access Purpose-built observatories.
- ●●Restraint Claims no detection.
- ●●Character record Harvard astronomers.
- ●●Checkable details check out Published papers and press releases.
- ●●Fits the documented skeleton Fits the documented post-2021 scientific turn.
- ●●Physical traces or official reaction Calibrated sensor data.
Plausibility weighs how well an account fits where secrecy hides the documents by design, so missing records never count against it. Strength measures what is documented. Assessed 2026-10-23.
On the record
- The project was co-founded in July 2021 by Loeb and Laukien — firsthand — Loeb & Laukien 2023 (arXiv 2209.02479).
- Its stated aim is a search for "potential astro-archaeological artifacts or remnants of extraterrestrial technological civilizations (ETCs) or potentially active equipment near Earth" — firsthand — Loeb & Laukien 2023.
- The observatory design is "multimodal and multispectral". It covers: wide-field cameras for tracking and triangulation; narrow-field cameras for morphology, spectra, polarimetry and photometry; passive multistatic radar; radio spectrum analysers; microphones from infrasound to ultrasound; environmental, electric-field, magnetic-field and energetic-particle sensors. — firsthand (design paper) — Watters et al. 2023.
- The acoustic system (AMOS) covers about 0.05 Hz to 190 kHz — firsthand — Mead et al. 2023.
- SkyWatch is a passive radar network built on commercial FM transmitters. It was in "Phase 1 testing" with receivers around the Harvard-Smithsonian CfA — firsthand — Randall et al. 2023.
- The eight-camera long-wave IR array prototype ("Dalek") was deployed at a development site in Massachusetts, within 5 miles of a regional airport, and calibrated against ADS-B aircraft — firsthand — Domine et al. 2025.
Claims
Where
Similar cases · sharing people, threads, topics or era
People and organizations
Threads · click one to see it on the board
Sources
- Loeb & Laukien, Overview of the Galileo Project (J. Astron. Instrum. 2023)
- Same, arXiv version read
- Watters et al. 2023, Multimodal Ground-Based Observatories
- Cloete et al. 2023, Integrated Computing Platform
- Szenher et al. 2023, Aerial Object Localization platform
- Randall et al. 2023, SkyWatch passive radar