Galileo Project: New Initiative To Search For Alien Life Through Their Tech

An international team of researchers has created a new project to look for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Called the Galileo Project, it will search for possible signatures of alien technology.

"The goal of the Galileo Project is to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research," the press release on the announcement noted Monday.

Simply put, the project, which has so far received $1.7 million from private donors, aims to "scientifically and transparently" look for possible evidence of artifacts or equipment made by defunct or active extraterrestrial technological civilizations (ETC).

Specifically, it will focus on three avenues of research -- to identify the nature of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), search for and investigate Oumuamua-like interstellar objects and search for possible ETC satellites orbiting the Earth.

It is headed by Harvard University's Avi Loeb, who made the news for suggesting that Oumuamua, the interstellar object that visited the Earth briefly in 2017, may have been alien technology. The object is flat, did not resemble any other known asteroid or comet before and "moved away from the Sun as if it were thin enough to be pushed by sunlight," the press release noted.

"We can only speculate whether 'Oumuamua may be explained by never seen before natural explanations, or by stretching our imagination to 'Oumuamua perhaps being an extraterrestrial technological object, similar to a very thin light-sail or communications dish, which would fit the astronomical data rather well," Loeb said as per the press release.

"Given the recently discovered abundance of habitable-zone exoplanets, with potential for extraterrestrial life, the Galileo Project is dedicated to the proposition that humans can no longer ignore the possible existence of ETCs," he added.

The project comes just about a month after the recent release of the U.S. intelligence report on UAP, which concluded that the nature of such objects remains unclear.

In an opinion piece published in Scientific American, Loeb noted that instead of dismissing the Pentagon evidence to be "insufficient," scientists should instead be "motivated to replicate it with better instruments."

"Irrespective of the possibility that the Galileo Project may discover additional, or even extraordinary evidence for ETCs, at a minimum the Galileo Project will gather rich data sets that may foster the discovery of — or better scientific explanations for — novel interstellar objects with anomalous properties, and for potential new natural phenomena, or terrestrial technology explanations for many presently inexplicable UAP," the press release noted.

The project is named after Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who used his telescopes to provide key evidence that the Earth is not at the center of the universe.