No one can serve two masters.
Either you will hate the one and love the other,
or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.
(Matthew 6:24)
Last year, at a U.S. congressional briefing called “Understanding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP): Science, National Security & Innovation,” Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb made a ‘small’ petition: he wished for a billion dollars to be granted to fund scientific UAP research, like his own Galileo Project. He didn’t seem to find his request a bit out of place, given how earlier that year Elon Musk’s DOGE had killed dozens of government programs, including USAID, with the excuse of ‘reducing unnecessary government spending’ —when it comes to allocating scarce public funds to take a closer look at weird lights in the sky (instead of preventing health threats among millions of people across the world) your mileage may vary; especially if you jump to the conclusion that any ‘unknown’ is a potential threat.
Loeb made this public appearance at the request of Republican representative Anna Paulina Luna, with whom he seems to have cultivated a strong association. After he made global headlines with the speculation that interstellar comet 3I/Atlas exhibited signs of being artificial in nature (just as he had done so with Oumuamua) he went to far as to accuse NASA of withholding observational data that would support his claim, which barely anyone in the astronomy field agreed with; who did he ask to intervene in his behalf? You guessed it—his pal in Congress, Luna.
Now, it seems as if Avi’s connection to the Trump administration is about to grow larger still: a new ‘UAP Science Advisory Council’ has been established at the request of the White House, AARO, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the FBI, and all Intelligence Community members.
This ‘A-team’ as he jokingly called it in a Medium post from June 13th (in which he also took the time to trash Spielberg’s Disclosure Day) will be presided by him, and will also include:
Prof. Carol Cleland: anomaly identification;
Dr. Richard Cloete: data analysis and AI tools;
Dr. Omer Eldadi: data management, AI, and human psychology;
Dr. Tim Gallaudet: oceanography;
Prof. Robin Hanson: statistics and economics;
Ross Howard: communication;
Dr. Kevin Knuth: physics and instrumentation;
Ben Lamm: oceanography and biology;
Dr. Devesh Nandal: numerical analysis and astrophysics;
Prof. Garry Nolan: molecular biology and materials science;
Dr. Michael Shermer: the study of anomalies;
Dr. Peter Skafish: anthropology;
Prof. Matthew Szydagis: instrumentation and data collection;
and Dr. Jennice Vilhauer: quantitative psychology.
In a more recent Medium post, Loeb provided more information about the goals of this new advisory council:
The civil duty of scientists like myself is to serve the U.S. government by interpreting existing data or recommending how to get new data that would resolve the nature of UAPs. This is a detective story that can be resolved with better data. All the data shared with the council will be unclassified.
The mission of the UAP Governing Board is to serve as an interagency body that can use each member’s capabilities and unique authorities to cohesively address national security threats posed by UAP. The Governing Board will also integrate and optimize interagency processes involved in the investigation of UAP incidents and collection procedures used to analyze UAP data to ensure more effective support to AARO. The UAP Governing Board, which will get advice from the Science council as well as other committees, will assist in the timely coordination of declassification of UAP-related information, in accordance with Executive Order 13526, Classified National Security Information.
I am honored to serve my country and help AARO resolve the UAP mystery.
The first thing that is evident from this group selection is that it omitted names like Hal Putthoff, Eric Davis, and Lou Elizondo; people who were directly involved with the previous AAWSAP/AATIP government-funded program which triggered this recent renewed interest in UFOs, and which was subsequently replaced first by the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG) and later by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).
Either Loeb wanted to enter into this new level of cooperation with the Trump administration with a ‘clean slate’, or it shows a total disregard for the objectives and conclusions of his predecessors—including their given assumptions about the existence of so-called ‘legacy programs’ and coverup strategies of hard evidence. The fact that Elizondo and Chris Mellon were once ‘research affiliates’ of Avi’s Galileo project, and that none of them are now part of his new A-Team, seems quite telling.
Of the names that do appear on the list, some of them leave me completely indifferent because I don’t know their professional trajectory (who the hell is Ross Howard?? I couldn’t even find a bio of him on the internet), some are intriguing (Clelland, for example, has written about ‘the search for life as we don’t know it’), some are very encouraging (Knuth and Szydagis are open-minded scientists, and members of the SCU; Gallaudet being on board —despite his personal quarrels with the previous director of AARO—could mean Loeb wants to take a closer look at USOs) an one of them leaves me shaking my head—Shermer has made a living pooh-pooing the UFO topic alongside other fringe topics, and even though Loeb claims he’s bringing him in as the designated ‘devil’s advocate’, his selection feels like inviting the CEO of McDonald’s to advise about healthy nutrition to the FDA.
Long-time students of the UFO topic have a right to ask: Will this A-team look beyond lights in the sky and into the more controversial aspects of the phenomenon, like alleged crashes or even abductions? Having Skafish and Nolan on board—the former a researcher of the phenomenology involving close encounter experiences, and the latter a self-proclaimed ‘experiencer’—gives us reason for hope… despite the fact of their connections to the Sol Foundation, an organization that seems too eager to capitalize on a phenomenon we barely have begun to understand.
The other thing that jumps at me is that Loeb doesn’t mention what will happen with the Galileo Project he started at Harvard 5 years ago, founded upon the premise that no government has censorship over the open skies. Will he continue to supervise it independently from his position as head advisor to the White House on UFO matters? Will it be passed on to one of his collaborators while he steps into this new role (two of the members of the new council, Cloete and Nandal, were part of Galileo) or is this indeed the unceremonious ending of Galileo?
Their page at Harvard hasn’t had an update in two years… so I guess that’s that. One wonders what would have happened if Avi had managed to convince his hero Elon Musk to fork in, if not a billion dollars, at least a few more millions into his attempt to build and install monitoring stations across different points in the US—would he have taken on this new position then?
This new development into the public investigation of UFOs, at a time when the Trump administration seems eager to let citizens ‘choose their own reality’ and interpret a shit-ton of data dumps however they wish to—thus fast-tracking UFOs into a new American religious movement—is interesting to say the least.
Will Avi Loeb follow the path of J. Allen Hynek, who not only started his career as a scientific advisor to Blue Book as a skeptic and ended up becoming a ‘believer’, but also recognized the phenomenon transcended our scientific theories and ontological assumptions?
Or will he end up following in the footsteps of Edward Condon, who never took the matter seriously, and whose report on UFOs closed the door to public scientific investigations in the United States for almost 60 years?
Only time will tell. In the meantime, here is hoping Loeb will continue to advocate for full transparency of the UFO subject, now that he’s going to work with the people directly responsible for obfuscating the topic.
