ConceptGalileo Project
aka Galileo Project · Avi Loeb Project · Harvard Galileo Project
Privately-funded systematic UAP- and interstellar-object-observation research program founded July 2021 by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, headquartered at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Operates instrumented observatories with all-sky cameras, infrared imaging, and radio monitoring; all data is published under open-access peer-reviewable methodology.
Founded 26 July 2021 by Avi Loeb (Harvard Department of Astronomy) following the June 2021 ODNI Preliminary UAP Assessment that established UAP as a defense-policy concern. Headquartered at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The Project’s stated mandate has two components: (a) systematic observational study of unidentified aerial phenomena using transparent, peer-reviewable instrumentation; (b) preparation for the detection and study of additional interstellar objects following ‘Oumuamua (October 2017) and 2I/Borisov (August 2019).
The Galileo Project’s research director is Wesley Watters (Wellesley College, planetary science); senior researchers include Frank Laukien (CEO Bruker Corporation), Garry Nolan (Stanford), and several Harvard postdoctoral researchers. The Project is funded by private philanthropic donations — explicitly avoiding government contracts to maintain open-data status — with significant donations from Eugene Jhong (former Yahoo executive), Bill Linton (Promega Corporation founder), and others. The first observatory, on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, MA, began collecting data in 2022 with all-sky cameras (Dalsa Genie Nano cameras with fisheye optics), infrared cameras (FLIR Boson), microphones, magnetometers, and radio antennas. Additional observatories at Pennsylvania State University and Las Vegas (UNLV) are in various stages of deployment.
In June 2023 Loeb led an expedition to the seafloor off Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, to recover fragments of CNEOS-1 / IM1, the 8 January 2014 bolide whose orbital trajectory the U.S. Space Command had certified (April 2022) as interstellar. The expedition recovered metallic spherules whose isotopic composition was analyzed at Harvard and at the Bruker corporate labs; Loeb and collaborators published a preliminary characterization claiming an interstellar origin in Research Notes of the AAS (2023). The interpretation is contested — Steven Desch (Arizona State) and others have argued the spherules are consistent with terrestrial coal-ash contamination from the highly-trafficked shipping lane. The dispute remains live in the peer-reviewed literature. The Galileo Project’s significance, independent of any single result, is structural: it is the first systematic UAP-observation program operating in a U.S. R1 university under open-data publication norms, with senior credentialed scientific leadership.