After more than three years of planning, hardware assembly, data collection, and analysis, the Galileo Project at Harvard University has released the commissioning data from its first Observatory — the first scientific instrument purpose-built to systematically detect and characterize UAP.
The Observatory System
The Galileo Project Observatory, located at Harvard University, features an original design of an array of sensors that monitor the entire sky at all times, collecting infrared, optical, radio, magnetic, and audio data. The workhorse of the system is called "Dalek," an array of eight uncooled infrared cameras placed on a half sphere.
It took two years for the research team to design and assemble the hardware components, another half year to calibrate the instruments, and a full year to analyze the preliminary commissioning data collected from January through May 2024.
Key Results
The commissioning data contains approximately half a million objects observed during the five-month collection period. Standard astronomical observatories focus on small portions of the sky at great distances, ignoring objects flying overhead. The Galileo Project's approach is fundamentally different — recording a continuous movie of the entire sky.
All data is uploaded to a computer system and analyzed by machine-learning algorithms designed to classify objects and flag anomalies.
Expansion Plans
The Galileo Project team is currently establishing two additional observatories in other locations, with the goal of tripling its data collection rate. In April 2024, the project received a generous grant of $575,000 from the Richard King Mellon Foundation to fund a third instrument station in Pennsylvania.
The Interstellar Meteor Connection
In parallel, Professor Avi Loeb's team published results in the journal Chemical Geology on spherules recovered from the impact site of interstellar meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08 (IM1). The team collected around 850 spherules ranging from 0.1 to 1.3 millimeters in diameter. According to Loeb, the material analysis raises questions about whether IM1 is natural or artificial in origin.
Scientific Significance
Professor Loeb stated: "These publications mark the beginning of a new era in the investigation of UAP and interstellar objects. Our researchers have worked hard to find new ways to apply the state of the art across many disciplines."
The Galileo Project represents the first rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific effort to apply calibrated multi-modal instrumentation to the systematic study of UAP.