The Pentagon and Harvard University have backed a Roscommon astronomer’s findings, 22 years after he was ‘ostracised’. 

A paper published last week, written by Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), and Avi Loeb, the chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department, suggested extra-terrestrials may have been able to travel to Earth.

Roscommon astronomer Dr Eamonn Ansbro had presented similar findings at the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) conference in California in 2001.

Dr Ansbro had been working on his theory that extra-terrestrial life had been watching Earth since the 1990s – but was met with ridicule from scientists when he presented his findings at SETI.

'Completely ostracised'

“I was completely ostracised at the conference,” he told Newstalk Breakfast. “50% of the scientists thought I was perpetrating a hoax to the community, and the other 50% thought ‘well, he has some data in this’.

“[The Harvard findings] show that there is some type of super craft on super orbits around the solar system, that links into the earth on specific tracks around the earth, whereby it ejects a number of probes, and these probes are probably what people are actually seeing” he notes.

First images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Image: NASA

Dr Ansbro said he went through a difficult point in his career after presenting his findings.

“It was a very challenging time,” he said. “It was so dramatic, the results I was showing, that I felt that they couldn’t integrate that reality that was there.”

“I think what they were expecting is that any extra-terrestrials or civilisation, particularly a signal, would be picked up using radio dishes – so beyond the atmosphere, so to speak.

“Not the expectation that they’re in our backyard, in our own atmosphere.”

Scepticism

The astronomer said he can “understand the scepticism” he faced – but now feels vindicated following the publication of the paper.

“When Galileo was showing the Moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus to all the archbishops, they didn’t want to look through his telescope,” he said.

“But he had proven it – that we do have phases of Venus that indicate that we go around the sun.

“But for 1400 years, we were at the centre of the universe according to the Catholic Church.”

Main image shows an astronomical observatory dome at night with stars and glowing light. Image: STOCKCONCEPTS / Alamy 

Reporting by Faye Curran.