(NewsNation) — A bipartisan group of lawmakers is digging into solving a decades-old mystery: UFOs.

Interest in UFOs surged following a 2017 publication of videos recorded by Navy fighter jets that saw unknown objects flying in unique, extraordinary ways.

During a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities hearing Wednesday, Dr. Sean M. Kirkpatrick, director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), said the U.S. Department of defines is tracking more than 650 cases; a spike from 366 back in January.

Avi Loeb, a Harvard University professor, told NewsNation the increase doesn’t surprise him because the government wants to figure out what the objects are.

“These are reports that the government receives as part of the day job, people monitoring the sky military personnel or sensors that the government owns. Then, they want to figure it out, because we cannot afford the luxury of not knowing about technologies that our adversaries may possess,” he said.

He added: “I address this phenomenon from a different perspective. As a scientist, we cannot allow for an extraterrestrial object to be in our sky that we haven’t known about. I see science complementing the government’s interest.”

Of those 366 cases reported in January, analysts said over half were unremarkable. This implies that over 150 were not easily categorized as balloons or drones.

Loeb co-authored a draft paper with Kirkpatrick last month that theorizes recent unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, the Department of Defense is studying could be “extraterrestrial technological probes” sent from a “parent craft.”

In Wednesday’s hearing, Kilpatrick said there was no evidence of extraterrestrial activity.

“I also state clearly for the record that in our research, AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known law of physics,” Kirkpatrick said in his testimony.

Yet, Loeb said the U.S. needs to determine “whether even one or more of these objects may have originated from an extraterrestrial technological civilization.”

He thinks the government has limited data. So, to figure this out, he said the the U.S. needs “much better data than the government was able to collect anecdotally.”

“(Data is) collected by chance, by all these sensors that are on fighter jets, or perhaps the Navy has on ships, and so forth,” he said. “The sky is not classified, but the government needs to know what these objects are in order to figure out whether they pose any national security threat.”

Loeb recommends building observatories like The Galileo Project, which he leads at Harvard University, to combat this issue.

“We built already an observatory monitoring the sky 24/7 in the infrared, optical, radio and audio, and we’re analyzing the data with artificial intelligence. We plan to make many more copies of this observatory and place them in various locations,” he said.

Overall, Loeb said we likely aren’t alone in the universe.

“I think it’s arrogant of us to think that we are unique and special and the smartest kid in the class of intelligent civilizations that ever existed since the Big Bang. Albert Einstein was not the smartest scientist who ever lived over the past 13.8 billion years, and we can learn from them. So let’s just look out for our telescopes and figure out what we are missing,” he said.