On 26 July 2021, astrophysicist Avi Loeb and chemist Frank Laukien announced the founding of the Galileo Project at a public press conference at Harvard University. The project’s formal name states its scope: the Galileo Project for the Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts. It was the first academic research programme to apply calibrated, multi-modal scientific instrumentation to the search for physical evidence of extraterrestrial technological civilisations, a complement to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’s focus on electromagnetic signals.
Two catalysts were cited on the record. The first was 'Oumuamua, the interstellar object detected by the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in October 2017, whose anomalous properties Loeb had examined in a 2018 paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The second was the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s preliminary assessment on unidentified aerial phenomena, delivered to the United States Congress on 25 June 2021. Initial funding of approximately $1.75 million came from private donors within two weeks of the announcement. The project has stated it will not accept government or military funding.
The Research Programme
The Galileo Project operates through three research branches, staffed primarily by volunteer scientists from academic institutions across multiple disciplines, from astrophysics and computer science to atmospheric science and religious studies.
The first branch monitors the atmosphere through ground-based observatories. Each station records continuously across infrared, optical, radio, audio, magnetic-field, charged-particle, and weather bands. The project’s initial observatory was built on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, equipped with the Dalek array: eight uncooled long-wave infrared cameras arranged in a 360-degree hemispherical configuration, paired with near-infrared cameras and an Nvidia Jetson computing platform running YOLO object-detection and SORT tracking algorithms. During its first five months of commissioning, from January to May 2024, the array reconstructed approximately 500,000 aerial trajectories and flagged roughly 16 per cent as statistical outliers. Manual review reduced the ambiguous cases to 144. These results were published in the journal Sensors in 2025. A second observatory in Pennsylvania was funded in April 2024 by a $575,000 grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation. A third operates in Nevada.
The second branch searches for anomalous interstellar objects using data from existing and future astronomical surveys, including the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time. The branch has also published design concepts for a space mission to intercept the next 'Oumuamua-like object, detailed in a 2023 paper in the Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation.
The third branch recovers material from interstellar meteors that have struck the Earth. Its flagship effort was the June 2023 Pacific Ocean expedition.
The project has published nineteen peer-reviewed papers across the Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation, Chemical Geology, Sensors, Astronomy and Astrophysics, and other journals. The first seven appeared in a special issue of JAI in May 2023, covering observatory design, passive radar networks, acoustic monitoring, satellite detection, computing infrastructure, and interstellar object intercept planning.
The Pacific Ocean Expedition
On 8 January 2014, United States government satellite sensors detected a bolide over the Pacific Ocean, approximately 85 kilometres north of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Catalogued as CNEOS 2014-01-08 and later designated IM1, the object’s impact speed and material strength placed it outside the range of all 272 other objects in the CNEOS fireball catalogue, including iron meteorites. On 1 March 2022, the United States Space Command issued a formal memorandum to NASA certifying a 99.999 per cent likelihood that IM1 was of interstellar origin.
From 14 to 28 June 2023, the Galileo Project mounted an expedition aboard the vessel M/V Silver Star. The team deployed a 200-kilogram magnetic sled fitted with 300 neodymium magnets, towed at ocean depths of 1.5 to 2.2 kilometres across twenty-six runs over fourteen days, surveying approximately 0.26 square kilometres of seafloor. The expedition was funded by a $1.5 million private donation from Charles Hoskinson.
The team recovered approximately 700 metallic spherules ranging from 0.05 to 1.3 millimetres in diameter. Laboratory analysis at Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Bruker Corporation in Berlin classified the spherules into standard I-type and S-type categories, plus a previously undescribed category designated D-type. Five D-type spherules exhibited a composition pattern the researchers named BeLaU: beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium concentrations up to three orders of magnitude above known solar-system materials, with very low refractory siderophile elements. Control samples from areas outside IM1’s calculated path matched standard solar-system compositions. The findings were published in Chemical Geology in September 2024. A memorandum of understanding between Harvard University and the Papua New Guinea University of Technology was signed in August 2023.
An Independent Scientific Node
The Galileo Project has defined its operating boundaries with unusual specificity. Its scope statement limits investigation to “known physics” explanations, explicitly excluding alternative-physics hypotheses. The project has stated it will not engage in retroactive analysis of existing UAP imagery or anecdotal reports, concentrating on new data from its own calibrated instruments. Its FAQ states that findings will be disclosed incrementally: “Significant discoveries will be documented in articles and sent to peer-review journals where other experts will evaluate the assessment, data, hypothesis, methods, and conclusions.”
The project’s relationship to the broader disclosure process has developed in practice. In November 2024, Loeb prepared a written statement for the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability calling for federal funding of scientific UAP research. He was not called to testify but published the statement. In April 2026, Representative Anna Paulina Luna visited Loeb at the Harvard College Observatory. In May 2026, following the release of 161 records through the Department of Defense’s PURSUE programme, the Galileo Project team published an independent analysis concluding that none of the released records required a non-human-technology explanation. Loeb characterised the release as “a transparency action with civic value, not a scientific dataset,” and positioned the project’s observatories as the appropriate venue for any future scientific test of an extraterrestrial-technology hypothesis.
From the Archive
The archive holds a biography of Avi Loeb, head of the Galileo Project:
- Avi Loeb: Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, founding director of the Black Hole Initiative, and head of the Galileo Project.
Related coverage:
- “Avi Loeb Asks Washington for Raw UAP Data, Not Processed Videos” (23 April 2026)
- “Luna meets Loeb at Harvard, opening a direct working line between the Oversight Task Force and the academic peer-review case” (29 April 2026)
- “After PURSUE: scientists, witnesses and Congress weigh in on the first UAP tranche” (11 May 2026)
- “The Scientific Record on UAP: What Official Studies and Reports Have Found” (5 April 2026)
