Are the Days of Grainy UFO Pictures Gone?
February 11, 2022
Avi Loeb, a Harvard professor, has long advocated for taking the hunt for alien life more seriously. He’s even pushed his colleagues to take UFO study more seriously in an eyebrow-raising quest. According to a new interview with the Guardian, Loeb now claims he intends to gather a “high resolution image” of a UFO within the next couple of years.
“I really want the next generation to be free to discuss it, and for it to become part of the mainstream,” Loeb says in a statement. “My hope is that by getting a high resolution image of something unusual, or finding evidence for it, which is quite possible in the coming year or two, we will change it.”
Last year, Futurism spoke with Loeb about his book “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” which claimed that an interstellar object that passed through our solar system in 2017 was an extraterrestrial probe rather than a mundane space rock. At the time, Loeb said that many of his colleagues were skeptical about UFO study, dismissing results as natural occurrences or the material of conspiracy theories.
“The scientific community can address a topic even if other people address it in a way that is not scientific and doesn’t make much sense,” he said.
Loeb is the director of the Galileo Project, which is assembling a network of advanced telescopes to search the heavens for extraterrestrial life. According to the Guardian, Loeb’s first telescope will start operating this summer from the top of Harvard’s campus observatory, equipped with infrared cameras that will be rolling around the clock, a radio sensor, an audio sensor, and a magnetometer to identify non-visual things.
“We’re taking a road not taken so there may be low hanging fruit, that nobody else picked because it was not taken,” Loeb told the publication.
According to Loeb, collecting significant UFO proof, such as the high-resolution photograph he wants to capture within the next two years, will attract younger academics who have been turned off by the older, more pessimistic community. If he succeeds — a big if, to be sure — we might finally have to take UFO studies more seriously.