If Loeb’s mother had been around at that point, he said, she would have tried to dissuade him from his late career into alien hunting. “She would say, ‘Why would you give up everything you’ve done?’” Loeb describes his mother, Sara, as an “interrupted intellectual” whose family pulled her from college in Bulgaria to move to Israel to establish this. When she and her two sisters were old enough, she continued her education, and during Loeb’s teenage years she took him to college philosophy classes. They are very close; until his death in 2019, they spoke on the phone almost every day. “I realized on a personal level that, up until that point, I had tried to please everyone,” he said. “After my parents passed away, I said: ‘The hell with it, I’ll focus on substance. I don’t care how many people like me or don’t like me, I’m just going to do what I think is the right thing to do.’” Criticism from other astronomers only hardened his commitment. “The more pushback I got,” he says, “the more it applies to me.”
May be the main scientists distanced themselves, but Loeb discovered another world of allies, fans and patrons. The government’s newly revealed interest in UAPs has made wealthy people think about how to invest in the search for alien life. That led them, naturally, to Loeb. “I started getting money without asking for it,” he told me. In May 2021, a Harvard astronomy-department administrator told Loeb that an anonymous donor had given him $200,000 in research funding. Within days, they determined it came from a wealthy software engineer named Eugene Jhong. Loeb arranged a Zoom call with Jhong and got another $1 million. At the same time, Frank Laukien, the chief executive of scientific-instrument manufacturer Bruker, who had read Loeb’s book “Extraterrestrial,” appeared on his front porch in Lexington. Together they decided to establish the Galileo Project.
The observatory near Boston has been operating for months, and they’re still training machine-learning algorithms to identify birds, planes and other common airborne objects. The goal is to install up to 100 such observatories around the world; so far Loeb has secured funding to install five more stations in the United States. Although the dream is to capture the first megapixel-quality image of an anomalous object, he said he expects most of these instruments to be mundane detections. “The Galileo Project is completely agnostic, there are no expectations,” he told me. I asked him how an experiment like this could deliver a convincingly negative result. The failure to photograph a UAP will never convince a believer that there are no alien ships in the sky, only that aliens are smart enough to avoid Loeb’s camera trap. “If we search the sky for five years, 24/7, and see nothing unusual except for birds and drones and planes, and we do it in tens of different locations, maybe 100 locations,” he said, “then let’s continue.”
A week after Loeb showed me the observatory, I joined a planning meeting for another initiative of the Galileo Project — an effort to retrieve an unusual meteorite that had fallen to Earth. A few years ago, Amir Siraj, a Harvard undergraduate working with Loeb, recognized a strange entry in a government meteor database: On January 8, 2014, an object exploded near Papua New Guinea. Its orbit suggested an origin outside our solar system, although it’s impossible to say for sure because the government satellites that spotted it are classified. In 2022, after much prodding from Loeb, the US Space Command issued a letter saying there was “99.999 percent confidence” that the Papua New Guinea fireball was interstellar. The government also published the meteor’s light curve, a graph of its brightness over time. From this, Loeb concluded that it had exploded so close to Earth’s surface that it must have been made of something harder than normal meteors, perhaps even an artificial alloy such as stainless steel. Which made him wonder: What if it was an extraterrestrial probe? And can he find her lips?
If there is any remnant of this meteor, or extraterrestrial probe, it is scattered on the seafloor north of Papua New Guinea. When meteors burn up in the atmosphere, the melt remains to form into sand-grain-size orbs called spherules that ascend to the ground like glitter. The logistics of searching for spherules under several thousand feet of water are daunting, but there is reason to think it can be done. In 2018, scientists used remotely operated vehicles and a “magnetic rake” to find spherules from a meteor that fell off the coast of Washington. Driven by that project, Loeb and Siraj began thinking about following the Papua New Guinea meteorite. Charles Hoskinson, a mathematician who made a fortune in cryptocurrency, heard Loeb talk about the meteor on a podcast and pledged $1.5 million for the find. To figure out the logistics, they hired EYOS Expeditions, the company that helped director James Cameron dive into the Pacific Ocean’s 36,000-foot Mariana Trench. They planned to go to the sea later in the spring.
