It all started in 2021 when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) published a report detailing recently declassified information about Unidentified aerial phenomena (Fani) those previously known as unidentified flying objects or UFOs.
Since then, the Department of Defense has published annual reports on Fani through the Office of Resolution of Anomalies of all Domain (AARO). However, There is still a shortage of publicly available scientific data.
To address this situation, a new study led by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics and the Galileo project proposes an infrared camera of the entire sky (Dalek) To look for possible indications of extraterrestrial spacecraft.
The study He was led by Laura Domine, from Harvard University and researcher at the Galileo Project. Over there A Dalek baptized instrument is described, due to its resemblance to the mutant aliens of the Doctor Who series.
This instrument is based on NASA recommendationswhere they pointed out that “future sensors specifically designed for UFO detection should be adjusted in millisecond time scales to facilitate better detection. In tune, alert systems should detect and share transitory information quickly and uniformly. Multisensor platforms are important to provide a complete image of these phenomena. The movement of an object must be recorded, as well as its shape (image data), color (multispectral or hyperspect), any sound or other characteristics ”.
Professor Avi Loeb, from Harvard University and director of the Galileo Project declared in An interview that “often, the data of the US government are classified, either because they were collected by classified sensors or because they are not completely understood and could be relevant to national security. In case of doubt, the data is not disclosed to the public or the scientific community. However, the sky is not classified, so the Galileo project operates a complete sky observatory at Harvard University and builds two other observatories in Pennsylvania and Nevada that look for anomalous objects in infrared, optical, radio and audio bands. ”
As Loeb detailed, These three observatories detect about 100,000 objects per month each And they have already obtained data of approximately one million objects. This is the largest database systematically collected on UFOs that the Galileo project analyzes by automatic learning software.
Algorithms are trained with family objects (airplanes, drones, balloons, birds, satellites, etc.), which allows them to analyze all observed fanis and detect atypical values. Besides, The study includes a summary of the first five months of observatory operation.
During this period Approximately 500,000 objects were detected. About 16 % of the reconstructed trajectories (approximately 80,000) were marked as atypical values with a 95 % confidence level and were manually examined with infrared images.
Of these, 144 trajectories were ambiguousand claim that they are probably common objects that cannot be classified without information, distance or other sensors.
The ultimate goal, according to Loeb, is to find the few (if there are some) Atypical values that could be considered evidence of a technologically advanced species.
“Our goal is to verify if there are objects that present anomalous features or forms -concludes Loeb -even if one between one million will show capacities that transcend the technologies created by the human being, would constitute the greatest scientific discovery ever realized. Such an object could suggest the existence of an extraterrestrial technological civilization from which we can learn about more advanced science and technology than those that humans developed during the last century. ”