A new project says it’s time for ET to come in from the cold. It plans to look for evidence of alien civilizations not in other star systems, but right here in our own.

Astronomers have been searching for extraterrestrial intelligence for decades. They’ve used radio telescopes to hunt for signals from other star systems. More recently, they’ve also been hunting for high-powered lasers. So far, they haven’t found a thing.

Project Galileo will look for evidence that other civilizations are poking around the solar system. The project is headed by Avi Loeb, a scientist at Harvard.

The project was motivated by several developments. In 2017, the first known interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua, passed through the solar system. It moved in odd ways. It might have been a comet. But Loeb suggested it could have been a probe from another civilization.

And this June, the military released a report on UFOs seen in the last decade by military pilots. The report said many of the sightings couldn’t be explained — but it didn’t say they were extraterrestrial.

The plan calls for Galileo to scan the skies for evidence of UFOs with a network of small telescopes. It’ll also look for more interstellar visitors like ‘Oumuamua. It’ll even scan for alien satellites in orbit. The project will use AI to sift through all the data. And it’ll make its findings public — letting the rest of us know if it sees any evidence of alien technology close to home.
 

Script by Damond Benningfield

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