The world's best astronomers announced the launch of a project to study UFOs

An international team of scientists has announced a new initiative to find evidence of technology created by extraterrestrial civilizations, according to phys.org. For this, a global network of medium-sized telescopes, cameras and computers will be created. The project involves researchers from Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, California Institute of Technology and Stockholm University, and is led by Galileo. Avi Loeb, a 59-year-old Harvard professor known for his pioneering work and collaboration with Stephen Hawking.

Just a month ago, the Pentagon published its report on unidentified aerial phenomena, which admitted that their nature was unclear. In this regard, Avi Loeb says: “What we see in the sky should not be interpreted by politicians or the military, they are not trained to do this. The scientific community should figure it out".

A few years ago, Loeb drew controversy from colleagues, suggesting that an interstellar object that visited the solar system in 2017 could be an alien probe floating on solar winds. Loeb set out his arguments in articles and in the book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond the Earth, which caused the rejection of many of his colleagues in the astronomical community. That is why the new project is named after Galileo Galilei - the great scientist was also not understood by his contemporaries when he provided evidence that the Earth is not at the center of the universe.

“We can no longer ignore the possibility that technological civilizations preceded us”, - says Avi Loeb. "If we discover extraterrestrial technologies, the impact on science, our own technologies and worldview in general will be enormous". In addition to studying UFOs, the Galileo project will investigate objects that arrive in the solar system from interstellar space and look for alien satellites.

Loeb calls such research a new branch of astronomy - "space archeology", and believes that it should complement SETI - projects and activities to search for extraterrestrial civilizations, which mainly investigate alien radio signals. Private sponsors have already allocated about $ 2 million for the work, but the founders of the project hope to increase funding tenfold.