A viral video showing the "Ghost of Kyiv" shooting down a Russian fighter yet was created with Digital Combat Simulator, "a simulation game that was first released in 2008," reports fact-checking website Snopes. From the report: The video was originally posted to YouTube by âoeComrade_Corb.â The original caption identified this clip as a simulation and noted that it was created as an homage to the Ghost of Kyiv. This footage is from DCS, but is nevertheless made out of respect for âoeThe Ghost of Kiev.â If he is real, may God be with him; if he is fake, I pray for more like "him."

When this video was posted to other social media sites, it was miscaptioned as genuine footage of the Ghost of Kyiv. While this video does not feature genuine footage, the general of the Ukrainian armed forces claimed that they had truly downed several Russian aircraft. CNN reported: "The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has claimed five Russian aircraft and a helicopter were shot down early Thursday, as Russian forces attacked Ukraine. The Russian military has denied the claims, state news agency TASS reported on Thursday."
Further reading: 'The Ghost of Kyiv' is the first urban legend of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: As of this writing, the Ruble is worth about 0.012 U.S. dollars. The Robux, the money people use to buy things in Roblox, is worth about 0.0125. This means that the Robux has slightly more buying power than the Russian ruble. The Russian economy has been in decline for some time, but both the Ruble and its main stock index took a nose dive on Thursday after Russia invaded Ukraine. As trading began that day, the Ruble collapsed and the Russian equities index, the MOEX, fell 45 percent. Both are in flux and have recovered some of their losses, but the situation with the Ruble is so dire that the Russian central bank has decided to step in and prop it up.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Friday that cyberattacks could trigger Article 5 of the organization's charter, the so-called "commitment clause" that considers an attack on any NATO ally an attack on all. NBC News reports: Stoltenberg's comment comes as national security professionals and cybersecurity industry professionals remain on high alert for any major attacks. While conflict on the ground in Ukraine continues to escalate, little has been seen thus far in terms of major cyberwar activities. Still, some hacker and activist groups have sprung into action. One ransomware group announced Friday that it supported the Russian government and would respond to cyberattacks on Russia by going after "critical infrastructures of an enemy." As for attacks on Ukraine, the country's computer emergency response team said Friday that it had seen a large email phishing campaign from Belarus targeted at military personnel. The statement comes amid a major cyberattack on Nvidia that was initiated at the same time as the Russian cyber warfare division started their offensive against Ukraine. Security researchers are concerned that somebody could put something malicious in one of the software updates that are then sent out to Nvidia's clients.

A radiation spike has been recorded near Chernobyl's nuclear power plant which has been seized by Russian forces, monitoring data shows. BBC: Invading Russian troops took control of the plant - the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster in 1986 - on Thursday, Ukraine said. Radiation levels increased about 20-fold on Thursday, monitoring stations there reported. But experts say another major nuclear disaster there is "extremely unlikely." The rise was caused by heavy military vehicles stirring contaminated soil in the 4,000-sq-km (2,485 sq-mile) exclusion zone surrounding the abandoned plant, Ukraine's State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate reported. The biggest spike was recorded close to the damaged reactor. Radiation levels are continuously monitored there -- measured as a dose that you would receive per hour in a location. Close to the reactor, you would normally receive a dose of about three units -- called microsieverts -- every hour. But on Thursday, that jumped to 65 microSv/hrs -- about five times more than you would get on one transatlantic flight.

Ukrainian cybersecurity officials have warned that Belarusian state-sponsored hackers are targeting the private email addresses of Ukrainian military personnel. From a report: Announcing the activity in a Facebook post, Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) said that a mass phishing campaign is targeting the private i.ua and meta.ua accounts belonging to Ukrainian military personnel. "After the account is compromised, the attackers, by the IMAP protocol, get access to all the messages," it added. "Later, the attackers use contact details from the victim's address book to send the phishing emails." CERT-UA has attributed the ongoing campaign to the UNC1151 threat group, which Mandiant formally linked to the Belarusian government in November 2021. Mandiant also linked the state-backed cyber-espionage group to the Ghostwriter disinformation campaign, which has been involved in spreading anti-NATO rhetoric and hack-and-leak operations throughout Europe. "The Minsk-based group 'UNC1151' is behind these activities. Its members are officers of the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Belarus," CERT-UA wrote.

With sanctions on Russia ramping up following its invasion of Ukraine, Google's YouTube is under pressure to remove or cut commercial ties with some of its most prolific pro-Russian channels. From a report: The online video giant has a massive reach in Russia and has long been a popular platform for both government critics and state-backed media. But now officials in the U.S., the U.K. and Europe are discussing restrictions that could target groups and people with huge audiences on the platform, creating a dilemma for the Alphabet-owned business. European Union sanctions, for instance, would target Vladimir Solovyov, a TV and radio journalist behind a YouTube channel with more than 1 million subscribers. An EU report issued on Wednesday said that "Solovyov is known for his extremely hostile attitude toward Ukraine and praise of the Russian government." A four-hour video livestream published overnight on his YouTube channel about the Russian military attacks had over 2.7 million views within its first nine hours. That video also ran advertisements, at least for U.S. viewers.

Russia President Vladimir V. Putin declared the start of a "special military operation" in Ukraine on Thursday, after months of speculation about Russia's intentions as it massed tens of thousands of troops on Ukraine's border. The New York Times: Addressing his nation in a televised speech broadcast just before 6 a.m. Thursday, Mr. Putin said his goal was to "demilitarize" but not occupy the country. Minutes later, large explosions were visible near Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, and blasts were reported in Kyiv, the capital, and other parts of the country. Ukraine's Interior Ministry said that Russian troops had landed in Odessa and were crossing the border. "The invasion has begun," the ministry said in a statement.

Ukraine's foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said on Twitter that Mr. Putin had "started a full-scale war against Ukraine" and had begun shelling civilian cities. "This is a war of aggression," he wrote on Twitter. "Ukraine will defend itself and win. The world must act and stop Putin. It is time to act -- immediately." Evoking the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Mr. Putin cast his action as a long-overdue strike against an American-led world order that he described as an "empire of lies." Even as he spoke, the United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting imploring him not to invade. In bellicose language, Putin also issued what appeared to be a warning to other countries: "Anyone who tries to interfere with us, or even more so, to create threats for our country and our people, must know that Russia's response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never before experienced in your history. We are ready for any turn of events." More coverage: NBC News, The Guardian and The Moscow Times.

The U.S. government's "dithering" has left the country "well behind" China in the race to build out 5G technology, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, as he urged Washington to step up investment in the next-generation internet technology. From a report: Writing in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Schmidt and Graham Allison, a professor of government at Harvard, said that America is "far behind in almost every dimension of 5G while other nations -- including China -- race ahead." The authors urged the Biden administration to make 5G a "national priority." Otherwise, they said, "China will own the 5G future." 5G refers to next-generation wireless internet that promises super-fast download speeds. But it could also form the basis for industrial and military applications and form a way for devices to communicate with each other. That's why it's seen as a critical technology and one of the reasons China is moving quickly with its own 5G rollout and future applications.

Hackers backed by the Russian government have breached the networks of multiple US defense contractors in a sustained campaign that has revealed sensitive information about US weapons-development communications infrastructure, the federal government said on Wednesday. Wired reports: The campaign began no later than January 2020 and has continued through this month, according to a joint advisory by the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The hackers have been targeting and successfully hacking cleared defense contractors, or CDCs, which support contracts for the US Department of Defense and intelligence community. "During this two-year period, these actors have maintained persistent access to multiple CDC networks, in some cases for at least six months," officials wrote in the advisory. "In instances when the actors have successfully obtained access, the FBI, NSA, and CISA have noted regular and recurring exfiltration of emails and data. For example, during a compromise in 2021, threat actors exfiltrated hundreds of documents related to the company's products, relationships with other countries, and internal personnel and legal matters."

The exfiltrated documents included unclassified CDC-proprietary and export-controlled information. This information gives the Russian government "significant insight" into US weapons-platforms development and deployment timelines, plans for communications infrastructure, and specific technologies being used by the US government and military. The documents also include unclassified emails among employees and their government customers discussing proprietary details about technological and scientific research.

The hackers have used a variety of methods to breach their targets. The methods include harvesting network passwords through spear phishing, data breaches, cracking techniques, and exploitation of unpatched software vulnerabilities. After gaining a toehold in a targeted network, the threat actors escalate their system rights by mapping the Active Directory and connecting to domain controllers. From there, they're able to exfiltrate credentials for all other accounts and create new accounts. The hackers make use of virtual private servers to encrypt their communications and hide their identities, the advisory added. They also use "small office and home office (SOHO) devices, as operational nodes to evade detection."

Ukraine's Ministry of Defense website suffered from what appeared to be a distributed denial of service attack Tuesday, according to the government's Facebook account. CNET reports: The military's website remained unavailable as of 12 p.m. PT Tuesday, with the Ukrainian military's Facebook account saying work is currently underway to restore regular functioning to the online portal. The nation's largest commercial bank, PrivatBank, has also been subjected to a "massive DDoS attack" for the past few hours, according to the Ukraine Center for Strategic Communications. There's no threat to customer funds stored at the bank, it said, though the attack is preventing customers from accessing the Privat24 application and viewing their balances. Online banking with Oschadbank is also down, the Center for Strategic Communications said, as reported earlier by Vice. Nobody has yet to be blamed for the attack, but as CNET notes, "it comes after Russia is believed to have mounted multiple cyberattacks on Ukraine as part of efforts that security experts say are designed to destabilize the country's government and economy."

UPDATE (2/16/2022): America's Undersecretary of State said Wednesday that "While we're still investigating and doing forensics along with the Ukrainians, I think what's most important is that these cyberattacks were not very successful," reports CNN, which adds that the official "credited Ukrainian officials for responding quickly and helping the websites recover."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Army released (PDF) its climate change strategy this week, and it's a lengthy document that shows how the largest and oldest branch of the military will not only prepare for climate change but will also zero out emissions from most of its operations and activities. The Army says that the goal isn't just to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions -- though that's a key outcome -- but also to make the force more resilient by "adapting infrastructure and natural environments to climate change risks." The strategy takes a multipronged approach toward addressing the climate threat, including overhauling the Army's installations and its acquisitions and logistics practices.

On just the facilities side, the Army buys more than $740 million of electricity every year, producing over 4.1 million metric tons of carbon pollution. To bring those numbers down while also improving its ability to operate when the grid goes down, the Army says it will install microgrids at each of its more than 130 installations by 2035. Already, 25 microgrids are "scoped and planned" through 2024. Microgrids are usually connected to the wider grid, though they can be easily cut off without losing power, allowing operations to continue if the connection is severed or the grid goes down. Currently, the Army is looking into solar, wind, and batteries to power microgrids.

On bases, myriad vehicles support day-to-day operations, and the new plan calls for the nontactical vehicle fleet to be all-electric by 2035. That includes everything from light trucks like Chevrolet Tahoes and Ford F-150s to massive prime movers like the "Dragon Wagon" and the HEMTT. Light-duty vehicles like the Tahoe are scheduled to be all-electric by 2027. Tactical vehicles, though, will take a bit longer. The Army hopes to hybridize them by 2035 before moving to all-electric in 2050. The plan doesn't spell out what it considers to be tactical vehicles, though the designation likely includes things like Humvees and MRAPs. Currently, there's no concrete plan for all-electric tanks and self-propelled artillery. The Army's plan is also requiring it to "proactively train its people and prepare a force that is ready to operate in a climate-altered world," the document says.

Furthermore, a "Climate 101" course has been rolled out "to introduce fundamentals of climate science to base architects and garrison commanders, and it says it will update all of its training modules, exercises, and simulations to consider the impacts of climate change by 2028," adds Ars Technica. "The goal is to prepare the entire force for whatever conditions climate change presents, from severe weather to a thawing Arctic."

In the early 2000s, the U.S. Army released America's Army, a video game meant as a recruitment tool. "The free-to-play tactical shooter was wildly successful, reaching 20 million players," reports Fast Company. "But come May 5, the servers will be shut down -- and America's Army will surrender to the forces of time." From the report: To date, no industry has embraced games as warmly as the military, though. America's Army, for example, started with an initial budget of $7 million of your tax dollars at play -- and quickly grew from there. Recognizing that players know a quality title when they see one (and ignore and ridicule poor-quality efforts), it assembled a team of proven developers and bought a license for the Unreal Engine, which was (and remains) one of the premier game engines on the market. America's Army was only supposed to be a seven-year project, but its success encouraged the Defense Department to stay with the game, with the Pentagon spending more than $3 million a year to evolve and promote it -- a drop in the bucket compared to the overall $8 billion recruiting budget.

How well did it work? A 2008 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that "30% of all Americans ages 16 to 24 had a more positive impression of the Army because of the game and, even more amazingly, the game had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined." The end of America's Army is hardly the end of the military's use of games as recruiting tools. The Army has its own Twitch channel (with more than 23,000 followers) and has an e-sports team that competes at tournaments -- with recruiters in tow.

A Russian court has sentenced three Siberian teenagers for terrorism Thursday for activities including plotting to blow up a virtual Federal Security Services (FSB) building in the popular online game Minecraft. From a report: Nikita Uvarov, Denis Mikhailenko and Bogdan Andreyev from Kansk, a town in Siberia's Krasnoyarsk region, were arrested in June 2020 for hanging up political leaflets on the local FSB office that included slogans such as "the FSB is the main terrorist" and support for Azat Miftakhov, an anarchist who was sentenced to six years in prison. All three suspects were 14 at the time of their arrest. The Eastern Military Court in Krasnoyarsk found Uvarov, Mikhailenko and Andreyev guilty of "undergoing training for the purpose of carrying out terrorist activities" on Thursday. Uvarov was sentenced to five years in a penal colony, while Mikhailenko and Andreyev were handed three and four-year suspended sentences.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has flown a UH-60A Black Hawk helicopter without a pilot for the first time ever. CNET reports: DARPA's Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System program was used to fly the helicopter on autopilot over Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on Saturday. The Black Hawk was kitted out with Sikorsky Matrix autonomous flying technology, and DARPA says it repeated the "uninhabited flight" on Monday. "Pilots can focus on mission management instead of the mechanics," Stuart Young, program manager in DARPA's Tactical Technology Office, said in a statement. "ALIAS ... includes the ability to operate aircraft at all times of the day or night, with and without pilots, and in a variety of difficult conditions, such as contested, congested, and degraded visual environments."

The Polish government has announced today the creation of a new cyber component inside its Army Forces that will be tasked with carrying out operations in cyber-space. From a report: Named the Cyberspace Defense Forces (Wojska Obrony Cyberprzestrzeni), the new branch will operate as a command center inside the Polish Army and will have the authority to carry out reconnaissance, defensive, and offensive operations, the Polish Ministry of National Defense said today. Work on establishing this unit began in 2019 and was formalized earlier today in a ceremony at the Club of the Military University of Technology in Warsaw, where Minister of National Defense Mariusz Blaszczak appointed Brig. Gen. Karol Molenda as the unit's inaugural commander. [...] With today's announcement, Poland becomes one of the very few countries in the world to formally create a cyber component for their armed forces after NATO officially declared cyberspace a formal warfare battleground and domain of operations at the 2016 NATO Summit, held in Warsaw, Poland.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Clearview AI, the shady face recognition firm which claims to have landed contracts with federal, state, and local cops across the country, has landed a roughly $50,000 deal with the U.S. military for augmented reality glasses. First flagged by Tech Inquiry's Jack Poulson, Air Force procurement documents show that it awarded a $49,847 contract to Clearview AI for the purposes of "protecting airfields with augmented reality facial recognition; glasses." The contract is designated as part of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, meaning that Clearview's contract is to determine for the Air Force whether such applications are feasible.

Bryan Ripple, a media lead at the Air Force Research Laboratory Public Affairs, told Gizmodo via email that Clearview will conduct a three-month study under which "no glasses or units are being delivered under contract," nor are any prototypes. Clearview, he wrote, stipulated "that security personnel are vulnerable while their hands are occupied with scanners and ID cards" and AR goggles would allow them to "remain hands-free and ready during this timeframe." "Clearview AI's Augmented Reality (AR) Glasses perform facial recognition scanning to vet backgrounds and restrict unauthorized individuals from entering bases and flightlines," Ripple wrote. "This 100% hands-free identity verification wearable device allows Defenders to keep their weapons at the ready, increase standoff and social distance, and confirm authorized base access using rapid and accurate facial biometrics while keeping threats distant. The results are improved safety at entry control points and for bases, faster identity verification without manual ID card checks, and cost savings by replacing the need for large permanent camera installations."

In a promotional document shared by the Air Force, Clearview argued that in the time it takes to scan an ID card at the entry point to a military facility, "A criminal or terrorist can pull a gun, knife, or weapon during this brief but critical moment, kill the Defender, and access the base." They argued the AR glasses would increase "standoff distance," save guards time while vetting high volumes of traffic and allow them to maintain distance from anyone contagious with diseases.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: One of the most outspoken proponents of the metaverse is struggling to find its place in this hypothetical virtual world. Microsoft has reportedly scrapped plans to make a HoloLens 3 -- what would have been a successor to its current mixed reality headset -- and infighting within the mixed reality division has fueled uncertainty about its future, according to Business Insider. One source told Insider that the decision to abandon plans for a HoloLens 3 would mark the end of the "product as we know it." Multiple sources said Microsoft had agreed to partner with Samsung to develop a new mixed reality device, a decision that has reportedly "inflamed" division within the team. One employee called the partnership a "shit show." Insider spoke to 20 current and former employees at Microsoft who described "confusion and strategic uncertainty."

Some folks within Microsoft believe the company should continue to make hardware while others favor pivoting to a software platform for the metaverse -- that is, a Windows for the digital world. There is also a question of which customer base to target. Microsoft employees are apparently split on creating hardware and software for consumers or continuing their focus on enterprise customers. HoloLens 2, the company's latest AR/VR hardware, is a commercial product that sells for $3,500. Ruben Caballero, a former Apple executive who was hired in 2020 to join the mixed reality and AI division, reportedly wants to shift focus to consumers and the metaverse. Others within the team believe they should continue selling to businesses, and even fulfill military contracts.

LinkedIn profiles show that at least 25 Microsoft employees working on mixed reality left to join Meta last year alone, and Wall Street Journal reports the team lost around 100 people in 2021, many of them to Facebook's parent company. The HoloLens team is now uncertain about the long-term goals of the project and whether they will transition to working on a software platform. Disagreement on what to do next has made HoloLens's future unclear, though Microsoft maintains its commitment to the headset and promises to release more products in the future, "Microsoft HoloLens remains a critical part of our plans for emerging categories like mixed reality and the metaverse," said Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw. "We remain committed to HoloLens and future HoloLens development." Despite slow progress, Microsoft has doubled down on augmented and virtual reality in recent months, claiming its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard will provide the "building blocks for the metaverse." Microsoft's mixed-reality plans now appear to be hanging by a thread, and its most ambitious project yet is on the brink of collapse, just as talk about the metaverse -- the future it was meant to help create -- reaches a fever pitch.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Israel is accelerating the roll-out of laser-based interceptors as part of a plan to surround itself with such technologies and reduce the high costs currently incurred when shooting down aerial threats, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Tuesday. Lifting the veil on prototype interceptors that would use lasers to super-heat incoming drones or the kinds of rockets favored by Iran-backed guerrillas, Israeli defense officials predicted last June such systems would be ready for action in 2025.

But Bennett announced a dramatically shortened timeline. "Within a year already the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) will bring into action a laser-based interception system, first experimentally, and later operationally, first in the south, then in other places," he said in a speech. "And this will enable us, as the years advance, to surround Israel with a wall of lasers which will protect us from missiles, rockets, UAVs and other threats," he told Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies. The laser system would be an addition to Israel's current air defenses based on Iron Dome, David's Sling and Arrow -- systems that launch interceptor missiles costing tens of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars each.

"The equation will be overturned -- they will invest much, and we little," Bennett said. "If we can intercept a missile or rocket with an electrical pulse that costs a few dollars, we will essentially neutralize the ring of fire that Iran has set up ... This new generation of air defense can also serve our friends in the region, who are also exposed to grave threats from Iran and its proxies.

DARPA has announced a new initiative called the Robust Optical Clock Network (ROCkN) program, which will look to develop a practical, super-accurate optical atomic clock that is robust and small enough to fit inside a military aircraft, warship, or field vehicle. New Atlas reports: Ignoring a lot of technical details, a conventional atomic clock works by using a beam of microwaves to measure the frequency of the target atoms, but by replacing the microwaves with light, the accuracy is boosted by a factor of 100. In fact, such optical clocks are so accurate that the most advanced wouldn't gain or lose a second through the entire lifespan of the universe. Such optical atomic clocks have been built, but they're still huge, delicate, room-filling machines that aren't practical for military application. The goal of DARPA's ROCKn program is to study the basic physics of the principle behind the optical clock and find a way to make optical atomic clocks with low size, weight, and power (SWaP). Not only that, they will be more precise and accurate than current state-of-the-art atomic clocks.

To do this, ROCKn will first look to produce a robust, high-precision small portable optical clock that can maintain picosecond accuracy for 100 seconds at a time. This clock would be small enough to install in a fighter jet or satellite and tough enough to withstand the temperatures, acceleration, and vibrational noise of such an environment. The second stage will aim to create a larger transportable version that can be used in a Navy ship or field unit that is accurate to a nanosecond for up to 30 days without an outside GPS signal.

Science magazine checks in on the new "Galileo Project" from controversial Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. It's searching for evidence of extraterrestrial technology, whether it's spotted deep in space by mountaintop observatories or by their network of rooftop cameras "designed to capture any UFOs prowling through Earth's atmosphere."

"After enlisting more than three dozen astronomers and engineers in the project — as well as some notorious nonscientists — Loeb hopes to solve the enduring UFO mystery once and for all. 'Scientists have to come to the rescue and clear up the fog,' Loeb says." Some researchers applaud Loeb's endeavor. "He has mounted a scientific attack on a problem that is frustratingly fuzzy," says Gregory Laughlin, an astrophysicist at Yale University. "A project like this would have been unthinkable 10 years ago." But others say Loeb is tarnishing astronomy and undermining the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) just as that effort has started to acquire a veneer of respectability. In particular, they are bothered by the outspoken UFO zealots with no science background whom Loeb has welcomed into the project. "He's intermingled legitimate scientists with these fringe people," says Caleb Scharf, an astrobiologist at Columbia University. "I think you lose far more by doing that...."

One part of the project would design software to screen the data coming from telescopes like the Rubin observatory for interstellar objects. But the core of the project would be a worldwide network of sky monitors, hundreds in all. Each dome-shaped unit, roughly the size of an umbrella, will contain infrared and optical cameras arranged like a fly's eye to capture the full expanse of sky overhead. Audio sensors and radio antennas will listen at other frequencies. Running 24 hours a day, the monitors are meant to record everything that moves through the sky, day and night: from birds and balloons to insects, airliners, and drones. Artificial intelligence algorithms, trained to discard known objects like birds in favor of fast-moving spherical and lens-shaped objects, will sift through the data, says Richard Cloete, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge, who is overseeing the system's software. "We're basically filtering out all the things that we expect to find in the sky," he says. "And all these things that are labeled other [by the AI] will be of interest."

Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute who sits on the Galileo Project's advisory board, points out that networks of sky cameras are not new. Since 2010, one SETI Institute network has detected 2 million meteors, and in the past few years, the LaserSETI project has begun to watch the sky for pulses of light from alien technologies. What's novel about the Galileo Project, Shostak says, is its focus on hunting for aliens in Earth's atmosphere. Both the Galileo Project and the SETI Institute "are looking for indications of extraterrestrial intelligence," he adds. "But that's like saying that studying unknown fauna in the rainforest is similar to those who are hoping to find mermaids or unicorns."

Loeb says a prototype sky monitor is being built now and will be affixed to the roof of the Harvard College Observatory in the spring. If the instruments work, he plans to make duplicates; if he can raise another $100 million from private donors, he will place them around the world. He says he won't utter the UFO word unless they see an object "that looks strange and moves in ways that human technology cannot enable."
A former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, who participates as an unpaid "research affiliate "for the project, points out that "One of the problems is that many of the areas we're seeing the greatest level of [UFO] activity are restricted military airspace. The Defense Department is not going to be real excited about bringing in a lot of instruments to record everything that's going on."

Ed Turner, a Princeton University astrophysicist who is part of the project's core research team, tells the magazine that he's more excited by the interstellar component of the project — and doubts that the ground-based cameras will actually pick up any evidence of extraterrestrial visits. "If the aliens don't want us to know about them, they'll likely know about the Galileo Project," he says drily. "They can just avoid our high-resolution cameras."

Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article