In late June, Avi Loeb sat for an interview and described his new government role the way he describes most things: with the breezy confidence of a man who has decided that other people's doubts are their problem. "It's like a detective story," he told the Associated Press's Collin Binkley. "It's a lot of fun, as long as you don't pay too much attention to the critics."
The critics, in this case, are not just academic rivals. They include a former Pentagon physicist who ran the very office Loeb's new council is meant to advise.
The White House has appointed Loeb — a cosmologist who served as chair of Harvard's astronomy department until 2020 and later founded the Galileo Project — to lead a new scientific advisory council investigating the national security risks posed by unidentified anomalous phenomena. According to the Associated Press report published June 30, the council reports to a UAP Governance Board overseen by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, itself a product of President Donald Trump's directive earlier this year ordering more transparency on UFOs and alien life. The board met for the first time in June.
On paper, it's a serious structural escalation. For the first time, an interagency board sits above an outside scientific panel, with Loeb's team formally positioned as one of several advisory groups feeding into it. After its first meeting, the council sent the Pentagon a request for more than 50 videos, images, and other documents related to known UAP incidents. Loeb has promised to brief the public and build a website to share findings.
The critics who aren't backing down
Sean Kirkpatrick, a physicist who previously led the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — the government body that officially investigates UAP — did not mince words to the AP. Loeb is "not viewed favorably" in the scientific community, Kirkpatrick said, and lacks national security experience. The makeup of Loeb's team, he added, suggests the White House is more interested in fringe theories than hard science. The White House did not respond to the AP's request for comment on the criticism.
Kirkpatrick's objection isn't abstract. AARO has consistently maintained it has found no evidence of alien life. Loeb, by contrast, has spent nearly a decade advancing increasingly exotic hypotheses — that a 2017 interstellar object might have been a "light sail" from an alien spacecraft, that small metallic spherules his team pulled from the Pacific Ocean floor in 2023 might have come from a distant planet or alien technology. Other researchers said those spherules were probably volcanic rock or coal ash. Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, put it plainly to the AP: "I don't know what's going to come of this, but we're not going to get any closer to answering these questions with him in charge."
"I don't know what's going to come of this, but we're not going to get any closer to answering these questions with him in charge."
Loeb's response to all of it is characteristically unbothered. "Let's keep our eyes on the orbs," he told the AP, "not the social media." In a July Medium post, he asked whether some UAP might represent Earth-based technology of a pre-human origin. In a separate Medium piece published July 14, he explored whether laser-produced plasmas could explain some of the UAP orbs the Pentagon has been documenting. Both pieces went directly to the public, bypassing peer review — the same habit his critics have flagged for years.
The council's composition itself has drawn scrutiny. It includes Timothy Gallaudet, a retired rear admiral who has publicly warned about UAP controlled by "nonhuman intelligence" and claimed the United States has recovered crashed aircraft — claims AARO has not corroborated. Also on the team is Ben Lamm, a billionaire best known for work on de-extinction biotechnology. And according to reporting by commentator Cristina Gomez, the council includes Michael Shermer, a prominent skeptic — a detail that, if accurate, suggests Loeb is at least gesturing toward internal critical tension. One analysis flagged a notable absence: no political scientist among the members, a gap that matters if the council's findings are ever meant to navigate the geopolitical and policy consequences of what it might conclude.
A disclosure ecosystem with very different standards
The Loeb appointment doesn't exist in a vacuum. It sits inside a broader, increasingly crowded public conversation about UAP — one where the line between credible official proceedings and speculative advocacy is getting harder to see.
On one end, there are real institutional developments. Luna, a member of Congress, opened a hearing on restoring public trust through UAP transparency, according to a House.gov announcement from September 2025. A bipartisan group in Congress has been pressing the White House for further declassification. David Grusch, the intelligence official who went public with claims about classified crash retrieval programs, is now reportedly calling for classified photos of UFO craft to be declassified — testimony that, while not independently confirmed, entered the public record through official channels. Christopher Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, has been discussing still-classified evidence in public forums alongside journalist Linda Moulton Howe.
On the other end of the information spectrum, the picture gets considerably murkier. Dr. Michael Salla's Exopolitics Today — a platform that operates with no apparent editorial standards for verification — has in recent weeks claimed, among other things, that the U.S. Department of Energy's removal of enriched uranium from Venezuela was a cover for the removal of "ancient tech recently found in Venezuela's jungles," that photos of monoliths on the Moon are "about to be released," and that a medbed exposé by a figure named Jorge Pabon details how the technology works "based on his direct experience." Salla's content also references claims about soul-extraction technology used by both extraterrestrials and "corporate-run black projects."
These are not claims this publication can verify, and the sourcing — anonymous eyewitness accounts, remote-viewing sessions, unidentified insiders — does not meet any standard that would allow us to treat them as reportable facts. They are documented here because they circulate in the same online ecosystem where the Loeb appointment is being discussed, and because the blending of serious institutional news with unverifiable fringe claims is itself part of the story of how UAP disclosure is being received.
What's striking is how that ecosystem is processing the Kirkpatrick objection. Salla's mid-week briefing noted, accurately, that the advisory council lacks a political scientist. That's a real and fair critique. But it sits alongside claims about alien-government hybrid agreements and underground spaceports that carry no evidentiary weight whatsoever. When credible criticism and unsupported mythology travel in the same container, credible criticism is the thing that gets diluted.
Loeb, for his part, has drawn a careful line — at least in public. He told the AP he doesn't buy into cover-up theories. "My impression is the government is baffled by not being able to infer the nature of some of these objects," he said. He has framed his council's work as starting from the assumption that UAP are human-made, approaching the question from a national security angle. That framing is defensible. Whether it survives contact with a team that includes a rear admiral claiming recovered alien craft is a different question entirely.
The structural tension at the center of all of this hasn't been resolved by anyone — not by the White House, not by Congress, and not by Loeb. The UAP Governance Board, the new formal architecture sitting above Loeb's council, is real. Its mandate implies accountability. But AARO, the institutional body with the most direct access to classified UAP data, has consistently reached conclusions that contradict the claims of Loeb's council members. Those two things are now formally in contact with each other, with no public explanation of how disagreements between them will be adjudicated.
"At a time when science is not so much celebrated," Loeb told the AP, "this is an opportunity to actually do good for all sides involved."
Maybe. What would actually clarify the picture is the public release of the council's formal charter — the document that specifies its authority, its relationship to AARO, and what happens when its findings conflict with the agency that officially says there's nothing to find. That document hasn't been published. Until it is, the most important question about this council isn't who's on it. It's who it actually answers to.