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Galileo Project sensors on top of Sphere in Las Vegas are monitoring the sky in infrared and visible light, in search of anomalous objects. Outliers are identified by artificial intelligence algorithms. (Image credit: Alex Delacroix/Galileo Project)

During a Valentine’s Day interview on Saturday, February 14, 2026 with the journalist Brian Tyler Cohen, posted here (and transcribed here), Former President Barack Obama was asked: “Are aliens real?” He responded: “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them. They are not being kept in Area 51.” Cohen then asked: “What was the first question you wanted answered when you became president?” to which Obama replied: “Where are the aliens?”

This is not the first time that Obama has commented on this topic. In a 2021 interview, he told the comedian James Corden: “Look, the truth is that when I came into office, I asked … I was like, ‘All right, is there a lab somewhere where we’re keeping the alien specimens and spaceships?’… They did a little bit of research … and the answer was, ‘No’… But what is true — and I’m actually being serious here — is that there’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are …We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory … they did not have an easily explainable pattern … So, I think that people still take it seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”

These sentiments were echoed in a hearing on September 9, 2025 before the House Oversight and Government Reform Task Force in the Declassification of Federal Secrets, where military personnel described mysterious Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). The visionary Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna who chairs the UAP task force, accused the Pentagon and intelligence community of a “lack of transparency,” arguing the task force “has been denied access to video and files related to UAP incidents.” Representative Luna added that “The American people are not fragile and do not need to be shielded like children from reality.”

“For too long, the issue of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena — commonly known as UAPs — has been shrouded in secrecy, stigma and in some cases outright dismissal,” Representative Luna said at the start of the hearing.

Indeed, governments and intelligence agencies are likely to notice unusual activity near Earth because their state-of-the-art sensors monitor the sky and oceans routinely for national security purposes. But UAPs are under no obligation to be detectable only by government-owned sensors. And so, it makes sense to collect scientific quality data on them and figure out their nature. There is bipartisan consensus on this issue, as evident in congressional hearings on UAPs.

This is the stated goal of the Galileo Project under my leadership, as described here. Our research team, which was reenergized by five new young scientists in spring 2026, is operating three scientific observatories in Nevada, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, in an attempt to measure the distance, velocity and acceleration of rare outliers among millions of objects in the sky. Our facilities include multiple units with infrared and optical cameras that monitor the entire sky at all times at these three locations. The data is analyzed by artificial intelligence algorithms which aim to find objects that behave outside the flight characteristics of human-made technologies. A key element in this identification procedure, which is not available for most UAP data reported so far, involves measuring distances reliably through the method of triangulation. Fast angular motion on the sky could be associated with mundane objects at a close distance. Based on known physics, fast moving objects — including a hypothetical warp drive — are expected to shock the air around them and produce a bright glow as observed for meteor fireballs.

Whether Earth is visited by aliens is not a question for insiders who are privy of classified information that is withheld within the U.S. Government, but a scientific question that can be best answered openly within the mainstream of science.

Aside from UAPs near Earth, a new path for related scientific discoveries is offered within the new astronomical frontier of interstellar objects which pass near Earth — like 3I/ATLAS, or interstellar meteors which collide with Earth — as reported here in a new paper that I co-authored last week with Richard Cloete, the `Oumuamua-Laukien postdoctoral fellow within the Galileo Project.

Perhaps one day, the state of the Union address by the U.S. President will include an official statement on the “State of the Universe.”

We should welcome visitors from interstellar space who can inform us on what lies far and beyond our terrestrial experiences. After all, the cosmos includes much more real estate and resources than we possess here on Earth.

If we find no scientific evidence for aliens, so be it. But it is definitely worth trying to search for them before dismissing the notion of interstellar dating partners. Staying alone is often a self-fulfilling prophecy voiced by people who refuse to admit that the search for a partner is worthwhile. This Valentine’s Day, we must remember that “Are we alone?” is the most romantic question in science.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

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