Two years ago, Portland-based audio engineer and Bangor native Andrew Mead emailed Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb on a whim.
He had read an article about how Loeb believed UAPs, or unidentified aerial phenomenon commonly known as UFOs, were deserving of legitimate scientific study, and was about to launch a new project at Harvard to do just that. A fascinated Mead made the case in his email that the study of acoustics, his specialty, would need to be a part of such a program.
Two days later, Mead found himself a part of the team for The Galileo Project, Loeb’s Harvard-based initiative that, using its own telescopes, cameras and sensors, searches the skies of North America for anomalous objects, sounds and atmospheric phenomena.
“Suddenly I was sitting in a call with people like Avi, people like [computer scientist] Stephen Wolfram, all these incredible minds. It was pretty surreal,” Mead said. “I definitely felt some imposter syndrome. But it quickly became clear that the team needed people with expertise from all areas, academic or not.”
Mead is one of two leads on the acoustic engineering team for Galileo. He and his team primarily focus on developing highly sophisticated audio sensors and software that can automatically recognize normal sounds, such as aircraft or wind, and differentiate them from anomalous sounds that could potentially come from extraterrestrial objects.
Just this past spring, Mead was part of a scientific paper published in the Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation detailing the systems the group has developed.
“Just as we use telescopes and cameras to see what might be out there, we also use audio instruments to identify sounds, like potential means of propulsion,” Mead said. “It paints a far more detailed, data-rich picture of what might be out there.”
There are two Galileo Project observatories, one in Colorado and one near Harvard. Five more are expected to come on line in the coming months and years. The end result will be a comprehensive survey of the North American skies, with the ability to capture and analyze any unusual phenomenon that may arise.
“We’re capturing everything we can, in the hopes that maybe we find that one thing that leads to something concrete,” Mead said. “There are hundreds of UAP sightings each year. Statistically, if we cast a wide enough net, we might be able to catch one and see what’s actually going on.”
Mead, 35, has been fascinated by sound all his life, starting as a kid growing up in Bangor, where he would play around with a four-track recorder owned by his dad, Maine Supreme Judicial Court judge Andrew Mead. After graduating from Bangor High School in 2006 and then from Tufts University in 2010, he co-founded the band The Other Bones in Portland, followed by a solo project and producing albums from other bands.
As with most of the members of The Galileo Project, Mead volunteers his time each week, helping to further test and calibrate systems and record data, while still holding a full-time job with a California multimedia production firm. While he does most of the work from home, he travels to Harvard regularly to meet with the rest of the team.
And as the project has grown, Mead has enlisted the help of more volunteers, including a longtime friend in the Portland music scene, Dominic Lavoie. Lavoie, a Madawaska native, is also a talented audio engineer, and is now helping to build and wire the acoustic monitoring systems Mead and his team have created.
“He’s an invaluable team member, and I love that he lives ten minutes away from me,” Mead said. “And to think we both come out of the northern half of Maine, and out of the Portland music scene, and we’re working on this really exciting, groundbreaking stuff, it’s just so cool.”
UFOs, UAPs and the search for extraterrestrial life has long been a fringe topic, shunned by most of mainstream academia, denied by the government and championed by enthusiastic but rather unusual individuals.
But sightings continue and public attitudes have begun to shift from mockery and toward cautious curiosity. Just last month, there was an unprecedented congressional hearing on UAPs, including sworn testimony from military members.
“I do think we are at a kind of tipping point in terms of lessening the stigma around this field of research,” Mead said. “We’re edging closer to the mainstream, as there’s more government transparency and more interest from the general public.”\
The Galileo Project isn’t just looking for alien spacecraft or evidence of extraterrestrial technology on Earth. It’s also looking for interstellar objects, like Oumuamua, a mysteriously long and thin object first detected in our solar system in 2017. It was later discovered that Oumuamua is most likely a chunk of rock and ice set adrift from a planetary system somewhere else in the galaxy.
“We’re not going into this with any agenda, except to figure out what these objects are. If they are all weather balloons, fine. If they’re interstellar objects, great. If it’s from an extraterrestrial intelligence, well, we’d certainly want to know that,” said Mead. “These are unknown things, and we are putting scientific rigor to the process of trying to figure out just what they are.”
