When purchasing a new phone or tablet, it is common practice to select the best technology for your needs within the available budget. This is also the strategy adopted by our research team in the Galileo project, a new program aimed at imaging unidentified flight phenomena (UAP), such as those reported by the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI) to the U.S. Congress on June 25, 2021.
Interestingly, I recently met an online retailer that allowed us to “add to the shopping cart” a one meter telescope for $500000. Fortunately, observing the sky at the right resolution to identify UAP requires only cheap telescopes.
Under typical weather conditions, the earth’s atmosphere is opaque to infrared light at a distance of about 10 kilometers or less. At this distance, to distinguish the characteristics of the size of the mobile phone on the UAP surface, the diameter of the telescope is about 10cm. The installation of several such telescopes in a specific location will enable us to monitor the movement of objects in three-dimensional space. These telescopes can be supplemented by radar systems that can distinguish physical objects in the sky from weather patterns or mirages.
If UAPs are solid objects, they should be heated when rubbing with air at high speed. The surface of an object that moves faster than sound in the air, such as a supersonic plane or space rocket, is heated for several times. I calculated that the infrared luminescence of fast objects more than one meter, plus the shock wave in the air around them or the heat generated by the engine they carry, should be able to detect the required distance through the infrared sensor on the telescope.
Data from optical, infrared or radio telescope systems will be fed into the state-of-the-art camera connected to the software, which will filter out objects of interest for Telescope Tracking. If a bird flies over an ordinary Observatory, it will be ignored. The Galileo telescope will track it. Man made drones or aircraft may be of great interest to some residents in Washington, D.C., but they are as boring as birds for Galileo.
My student Amir Siraj and I calculated that the number of UAPs described in the ODNI report is equivalent to one object per 100000 square kilometers per year (uncertainty up to 100 times). This is far lower than the rate of unidentified objects in mobile phone photos or civilian witness testimony, which means that many of these unofficial sightings may have ordinary explanations. Millions of mobile phones with an aperture of MM are not as good as Galileo suggested: the number of optimized telescope systems with an aperture of 100 times larger is much less, which are used to track UAP quickly.
The tip of the iceberg of confidential reports – of which only one tip is publicly disclosed – may contain higher quality images than those released to the public. Galileo’s goal was to take new and clear images with better instruments than those used by civilians. The complete data set of the project will be public, and most of the data related to ODNI reports are confidential because they are obtained by government-owned sensors. Since the sky is not classified, Galileo telescopes will work like ordinary telescopes, but they will focus on nearby objects. Our goal is to bring UAP research into the mainstream of credible scientific research, so as to change the knowledge pattern of UAP research.
In the book “aliens” published six months ago, I believe that bringing the exploration of scientific and technological relics into the mainstream of astronomy will attract new funds and young talents to enter the field of science. In recent weeks, this prediction has become a reality. The Galileo project attracted millions of dollars from private donors and thousands of commitments from volunteers willing to contribute their time and resources. However, given the low incidence rate of UAP in ODNI report, the project will require hundreds of telescope to find UAP within a few years. This is an order of magnitude more than the funds we have collected so far.
With good enough data, alien technology can be distinguished from earth technology or natural objects. The Galileo project will attempt to obtain these data from UAP and unusual interstellar objects such as umua MUA.
If prehistoric cave dwellers found a mobile phone, they would initially think it was a shining rock they had never seen before. But this may be the beginning of their learning experience. By pressing the button on this strange rock, these early humans could record sounds and images.
Similarly, the strange “oumuamua” has been interpreted as a new type of asteroid, such as a frozen piece of pure hydrogen or pure nitrogen. But what if the high-resolution image of such a strange object shows a button? It can encourage us to learn more by landing on the surface, just as the Osiris Rex spacecraft recently landed on the asteroid Benu. Here, I hope astronomers will be open enough to check.