Professor Avi Loeb announces that the White House, AARO, and ODNI have asked him to assemble and lead a new UAP Science Advisory Council, bringing scientific rigor to the study of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.
The Harvard astrophysicist who leads the Galileo Project and serves on the Disclosure Foundation's advisory board, has announced that he was asked to assemble and lead a new UAP Science Advisory Council to support the federal government's work on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.
Writing on the same day the government released its third batch of declassified UAP files, Loeb said the council was established by the White House, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other members of the Intelligence Community. He described being tasked over the prior week with building a team of scientists to serve on it.
Loeb will chair the council. He named five researchers as its founding members:
Dr. Richard Cloete, data analysis and data management with AI tools
Dr. Regina Sarmiento, data analysis and data management with AI tools
Prof. Matthew Szydagis, instrumentation and data collection
Dr. Devesh Nandal, numerical analysis and astrophysics
Dr. Omer Eldadi, data management, AI, and human psychology
The group's stated purpose is to help government agencies study the nature of UAP through rigorous scientific methods, with an emphasis on collecting and analyzing higher-quality data rather than relitigating older material that cannot be independently verified.
The announcement arrived alongside the third release of government UAP files. Among the newly public documents is a report dated June 5, 2026 and signed by Dr. Jon Kosloski, the director of AARO, describing anomalous phenomena observed by law enforcement officials over two days in October 2023, including an orange "mother" orb that appeared to launch smaller red orbs. According to that report, roughly 40 percent of the phenomena documented in the case remain unexplained.
For Loeb, that unresolved fraction is precisely where scientific attention belongs. He has consistently framed the question around two possibilities, both of which he argues deserve serious study. The first, and most down-to-earth, is that some objects are human-made technologies operated by other nations, in which case their appearance near sensitive sites would represent a national security concern. The second, which he describes as far less likely but far more consequential, is that a small number of objects could have a non-human origin. Distinguishing between the two, he argues, calls for better instruments and careful analysis rather than speculation.