David Grusch told Fox News in June 2026 that the White House holds the 'keys to the car' on UAP disclosure — and that he personally viewed photographs of recovered craft that 'fundamentally changed his worldview.' Days later, the same White House announced a new UAP Science Advisory Council led by Harvard physicist Avi Loeb. The council was framed as a serious scientific body. One of its members is Michael Shermer, a professional skeptic whose career has been built on debunking paranormal claims.
That combination — a whistleblower saying the government is sitting on recovered craft, and a government-backed science council featuring the UAP field's most prominent doubter — captures the central contradiction now running through the official UFO disclosure effort. What exactly is this council designed to do, and for whom?
The Council Exists and Loeb Is Running It
Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist who founded the Galileo Project to search for evidence of extraterrestrial technological artifacts, has publicly confirmed his leadership role in what is being called the White House UAP Science Advisory Council. His Medium posts from April and June 2026 discuss the forthcoming UFO file releases and the council's formation in some detail. A June 16 post was titled 'More Details on the UAP Science Advisory Council,' signaling that the structure is real and that Loeb considers himself the public face of it.
His Medium posts from April and June 2026 discuss the forthcoming UFO file releases and the council's formation in some detail.
Cristina Gomez, a UAP commentator whose YouTube reviews have covered each successive Pentagon file drop, reported on June 16 and June 17 that the council is operational and that its membership includes not just Loeb but Michael Shermer — a figure well known for his work at Skeptic magazine and his long history of arguing against extraordinary claims about UFOs and the paranormal. Gomez described the council as 'White House-backed,' though her channel, UFOs-Disclosure, is a tier-4 source with an advocacy orientation. That framing deserves weight but not uncritical acceptance.
What is independently reportable: Loeb himself has written about the council. Fox News reported on Loeb discussing 'mysterious orb sightings in newly released Pentagon UFO files' as recently as June 13, 2026. The council exists in some form. Shermer's inclusion has been reported by multiple outlets covering the story.
The question the council's formation raises is not whether it exists, but what it is actually positioned to accomplish — and whether its composition tells us something about the White House's intentions.
The Skeptic in the Room — and the Expertise That Isn't
Shermer's presence on the council is either a sign of intellectual honesty or a structural hedge, depending on how you read it. Including a rigorous skeptic in a body designed to evaluate extraordinary claims is defensible science policy. It is also a convenient way to ensure that no council recommendation comes out too strongly in favor of conclusions the administration might find politically inconvenient.
The sharper problem, flagged in reporting around Gomez's June 17 video, is what the council reportedly lacks. According to that coverage, the UAP Science Advisory Council has no political scientist. That gap matters more than it might appear. A body advising the White House on UAP policy — questions that involve classification decisions, congressional oversight, treaty implications, and the management of public trust — without anyone trained in governance, political institutions, or national security policy is a body optimized for physical science questions while potentially blind to the bureaucratic and political ones.
This is not a minor quibble. The UAP disclosure debate is not primarily a physics problem right now. It is a government transparency problem. The core dispute — what has been recovered, by whom, and why it has been withheld — is fundamentally a question about how institutions manage classified information and respond to congressional oversight. Loeb can characterize plasma orbs. Shermer can argue for prosaic explanations. Neither is positioned to map the interagency politics of a retrieval program's classification history.
The contradiction here is real: the council is presented as a comprehensive advisory body on UAP, but its reported composition, heavy on physical scientists and light on governance expertise, fits a narrower brief — one that may or may not intersect with the disclosure questions that Grusch and others have placed at the center of the debate.
Grusch Says There's More. The Files Say Something Else.
Running alongside the council story is a second, harder-edged contradiction between what the Pentagon has released and what insiders say remains hidden.
Fox News reported in June 2026 that Loeb discussed 'mysterious orb sightings in newly released Pentagon UFO files,' suggesting a third batch of declassified documents has reached the public. Gomez's June 17 review described those releases as including information on plasma orbs. The Pentagon has, by multiple accounts, released material — files, videos, images — in successive drops across spring and early summer 2026.
But Christopher Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence who has been one of the more credible establishment voices in the UAP disclosure push, reportedly commented specifically on still-classified evidence — material that has not been released and, in his telling, remains out of public reach. That claim is attributed to Mellon in Gomez's June 17 coverage, though it comes through a tier-4 source and lacks a direct quote or primary document citation.
Grusch goes further. In his Fox News appearance, covered by the UFOs-Disclosure blog on June 15, he claimed to have personally viewed photographs of recovered non-human craft. He said the Trump administration holds the 'keys to the car' on disclosure — implying that political will, not classification law, is the limiting factor. The blog carrying this claim is a tier-4 source; the underlying Fox News segment has not been independently quoted here in full. But Grusch's testimony before Congress in 2023 — in which he alleged the U.S. government has recovered non-human craft and biological material — is a matter of public congressional record, and his June 2026 Fox News appearance appears consistent with that prior testimony.
The tension, then, is this: the government says it is releasing UFO files. A former intelligence officer and congressional witness says there are photographs of recovered craft that he has seen. Mellon, a former senior Pentagon official, says classified evidence remains. These claims are not reconcilable with the idea that the current file releases constitute full disclosure.
None of these claims — Grusch's photographs, Mellon's classified-evidence assertion — have been verified independently. The Pentagon has not confirmed them. There is no primary source document establishing what remains classified. The absence of official response to Grusch's specific photograph claim is itself notable.
What the Vice President Apparently Hasn't Read
There is a third thread worth pulling. Reporting in the same news cycle noted that the Vice President had admitted to not yet reading the UFO files that have already been released. That detail sits awkwardly against the framing of disclosure as a serious, coordinated White House priority. If the executive branch's second-ranking official has not engaged with the material already public, it raises questions about whether the file releases represent a genuine policy priority or a political gesture timed to manage public pressure.
This does not resolve anything. It is possible to manage a disclosure process without the Vice President personally reading every file. But the detail adds texture to an already complicated picture: a White House that has commissioned a science advisory council, endorsed file releases, and — through Trump's own public statements, referenced in Loeb's April 2026 Medium post — promised files 'coming out very soon,' while a senior official has not found time to review what's already out.
What Is and Isn't Established
Set aside the most extraordinary claims and here is what can be said with reasonable confidence: the Pentagon has released multiple batches of UAP-related files in 2026. A UAP Science Advisory Council led by Avi Loeb has been formed with some form of White House backing. Michael Shermer is reportedly among its members. Loeb has written publicly about the council and about the Pentagon files. Grusch has continued to make public claims about recovered craft, including in a June 2026 Fox News appearance.
What cannot be confirmed: the full membership and mandate of the council; what specifically the released files contain beyond general descriptions of orbs and unexplained aerial phenomena; whether Mellon's classified-evidence comments constitute a formal allegation or a general observation; whether Grusch's photograph claim is documented anywhere beyond his own testimony.
Two things would materially close the most important gaps here. First, a published charter or official membership list for the UAP Science Advisory Council would allow independent assessment of its scope and expertise. Second, any corroborating documentation for Grusch's photograph claim — a congressional referral, an inspector general finding, a named official willing to confirm on record — would shift his allegation from testimony to evidence.
Until then, the council exists in the space where genuine scientific initiative and political management of public expectations tend to overlap and become difficult to distinguish. Loeb's credibility as a scientist is real. So is the structural oddity of a disclosure-era advisory body that, by its reported composition, may be better suited to examining what UAP are physically than to confronting the harder question of what the government has already recovered and why it hasn't said so.