Richard Cloete is a computer scientist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, where he holds the Laukien-Oumuamua Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and works with Avi Loeb on the Galileo Project. His specialty is machine-learning software for finding and classifying objects in sky data, from things crossing the air above Galileo's observatories to bodies arriving from interstellar space. In June 2026 Loeb named him to the UAP Science Advisory Council, listing his expertise as data analysis and AI tools.

Cloete holds a doctorate in computer science, and the Galileo Project's staff page says he came to Harvard from a postdoctoral post at the University of Cambridge. His earlier papers were outside astronomy: a 2019 study with Nick Holliman measured and simulated latency in interactive remote-rendering systems, and a 2020 paper at the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society examined how providers of pre-built AI services could monitor customers for misuse.

At Galileo he co-authored the project's 2023 overview of multimodal ground-based observatories for studying unidentified aerial phenomena, published in the Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation, along with companion papers on a passive radar network, acoustic monitoring and aerial-object localization. He was also an author of the 2025 Sensors paper commissioning an all-sky array of infrared cameras, designed to keep a continuous census of natural and human-made objects in the sky so that anything fitting neither category stands out.

His astronomical work runs in parallel. With Loeb and Peter Vereš he has published machine-learning methods for classifying interstellar objects in Vera C. Rubin Observatory survey data and for improving near-Earth object discovery. With Loeb he proposed in a 2025 preprint that the "dark comet" 2005 VL1 might be the Soviet Venera 2 spacecraft, set an upper limit on non-gravitational acceleration of 3I/ATLAS, and in 2026 reported interstellar meteor candidates in NASA's CNEOS fireball database, results submitted for peer review.

Cloete was a co-author of the council's first paper, posted in October 2026 and led by astrobiologist Jacob Haqq-Misra. It concluded that six objects in the declassified infrared video DOW-UAP-PR135, which an Air Force crew had estimated at 480 mph, were most likely a small flock of birds whose speed was overestimated through parallax. Cloete and Loeb supplied the Galileo infrared recordings of birds whose wingbeat flicker served as the comparison. Skeptic Mick West accepted the result but called the effort more than the case needed, saying experienced video analysts had identified birds weeks earlier. The study put Galileo's ground-based infrared archive to work as a reference set for government UAP footage, the data-analysis role Loeb cited when naming Cloete to the council.