The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) recently released a report in 2021 that revealed declassified information on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Following this, the Department of Defense has been releasing annual reports on UAP through the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), although there is a lack of publicly available scientific data.
In response to this, a new study led by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the Galileo Project proposes the development of an All-Sky Infrared Camera named Dalek to search for potential indications of extraterrestrial spacecraft. The study was spearheaded by Laura Domine, a member of the Keto-Galileo Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University and a researcher with the Galileo Project, along with researchers from various institutions.
The proposal for Dalek was presented at the 2025 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, where the researchers detailed the instrument’s multimodal, multispectral ground-based observatory design, commissioning process, and calibration methods. The instrument is named after the machine antagonists from the Doctor Who franchise due to its resemblance.
Professor Avi Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University and the Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation, emphasized the importance of the project in uncovering anomalous objects in the sky. The Galileo Project operates three observatories that detect around 100,000 objects per month each, analyzing the data using machine-learning software.
The software includes object detection models and trajectory reconstruction algorithms trained on various objects to identify outliers among observed UAPs. In the initial five months of operation, the observatories detected 500,000 objects, with 16% of trajectories classified as outliers. The team aims to measure distances to objects in the future to enhance anomaly identification.
The ultimate goal of the project is to identify outliers that could potentially indicate the presence of technologically advanced species, known as technosignatures. Finding such evidence would be a groundbreaking scientific discovery, shedding light on advanced science and technology beyond human capabilities.
The full paper detailing the project was published in the journal Sensors. The research aims to contribute to the ongoing investigation of UAP and potentially uncover evidence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations. This article was originally published by Universe Today, and the original version can be accessed for further information.
