Half a Million Objects. Zero Anomalies. Published Anyway.

Avi Loeb launched the Galileo Project on July 26, 2021, three weeks after the intelligence community conceded it could not explain 143 of 144 incidents. 1 His premise followed directly from that failure: the problem is not secrecy, it is that nobody has been collecting usable data.

So he built instruments. The project's design is a network of ground-based observatories running continuous sky monitoring, with machine-learning analysis, and a commitment to publish the data openly. 23 The first system, an array of eight uncooled infrared cameras on a hemispherical mount, is called Dalek. 5

Roughly $1.8 million in private funding got it started, including $1 million from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had heard Loeb on a podcast. 4

The results, honestly

Between January and May 2024, the observatory logged about half a million objects. 56 Loeb published the commissioning data openly, as promised. 6

Not one of them has been confirmed as anomalous after surviving conventional explanation. As of early 2026, no peer-reviewed paper from the project reports a definitive UAP identification; the published work is about instruments and methods rather than discoveries. 7 The first data release landed to near silence. 8

The project's peer-reviewed output has been real but technical: a 2023 paper in the *Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation* on multimodal ground-based observation, and a preprint describing a passive multistatic radar system for measuring 3D position and velocity out to roughly 150 kilometres. 7

Why that counts as success

Half a million objects, zero anomalies, published openly, is a result. It is a measured background rate — the thing this field has never had.

Every argument about a UFO video is an argument about how unusual the object is. Nobody could say, because nobody had counted what ordinarily crosses the sky. Now somebody has started counting.

Loeb attracts criticism, much of it earned, for how far ahead of his evidence he is willing to speculate in public — a pattern repeated at length during the 3I/ATLAS interstellar object debate of 2025. 7 But the Galileo Project's actual conduct has been the opposite of its founder's rhetoric: instruments, open data, null results, published anyway.