A Distance Measurement is Worth a Thousand Words Regarding the Nature of UAP

Triangulation of a UAP from the three units of the Galileo Project in Las Vegas, Nevada. The three observing units, labeled: sphere, hideout and wildhorse at the top left corner of each panel, are separated by 10.2, 10.1 and 2.0 kilometers from each other. The object inside the yellow box is observed from different directions by these three units, enabling a measurement of its distance. (Image Credit: R. Sarmiento et al., Galileo Project)

An unknown object moving across the sky in a fraction of a second could be a nearby bird or a distant artifact of a non-human origin. This wild range of possible interpretations is why the images and videos of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) that were released in recent months by the U.S. Government here, received more than 2 billion views.

Unfortunately, the publicly available UAP data does not include distance assessments and so it is impossible to gauge whether the speed of UAP is within the expected performance envelope of natural phenomena or human-made technologies.

This is why scientific analysis of existing data and sensor recommendations by the UAP Science Advisory Council (https://uapsac.com/) under my leadership, will be assist the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution office in the Pentagon, the White House, the FBI and the intelligence community, in figuring out the nature and origin of UAP.

A single case of a UAP with an accurately measured distance is worth more than many cases of unidentified objects that move swiftly across the sky, because we will never be able to decide whether they could be natural phenomena like bugs, birds, ball lightning or meteors, human-made phenomena like laser spots, drones, balloons, aircrafts or satellites, or alien artifacts.

In recognition of this challenge, the Galileo Project (https://galileo.hsites.harvard.edu/) under my leadership, constructed observatories that are capable of measuring distances using a network of infrared, visible, radio and audio sensors. The latest Galileo Observatory in Las Vegas includes three units that form a nearly isosceles triangle with three legs of lengths 10.2, 10.1 and 2.0 kilometers. Observing a UAP from three directions allows us to triangulate its distance velocity and acceleration.

Let me illustrate that capability with a recent example that was analyzed over the past week by the brilliant Galileo postdoc, Dr. Regina Sarmiento.

An object (black dot, moving along the short red line) was spotted by the three units of the Galileo Observatory (labeled sphere, hideout and wildhorse) and identified as an aircraft through its ADS-B data (yellow line overlapping with the motion of the black dot).

This educational case involves an object detected on May 30, 2026 at a triangulated distance of order 20–30 kilometers. Fortunately, the object was also identified in Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) tracking data as an aircraft. This identification allowed us to know the ground truth and compare the actual distance to the triangulated distance. Regina’s analysis (attached in the figures below) demonstrates that the triangulated distance measurement was accurate to within a few hundred meters, a fraction of a percent of the actual separation of 20–30 kilometers between the aircraft and the different observation units.

Left panel: Comparison between the triangulated path of the object (red) and the ADS-B ground truth (green). Right panel: The separation between the triangulated path and the ADS-B path is below a percent of the actual distance of the object.

The bottom line from this example is simple: a distance measurement is worth a thousand words in assessing the nature of UAP.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

(Image Credit: Lotem Loeb, May 22, 2026)

Avi Loeb is chair of the UAP Science Advisory Council to the White House, Pentagon, FBI and intelligence agencies, director of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former 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](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674987579)”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “[Interstellar](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/interstellar-avi-loeb-1?variant=40982888415266)*”, was published in August 2024.

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