Avi Loeb to lead White House UFO council as UAP files grow

Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer who became a public lightning rod after arguing that the interstellar object Oumuamua could have been a thin light sail from an alien spacecraft, has been tapped to lead a White House scientific advisory council on UFOs. The panel, called the UAP Science Advisory Council, is being built around national-security and transparency concerns as the federal government expands its review of unidentified anomalous phenomena.

The new council is tied to requests from the White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Pentagon, and it will report to a separate UAP Governance Board that ODNI and the FBI established with the Defense Department. That board held its first meeting on June 17, 2026, as the administration intensified its push to declassify more information on UAPs.

Loeb said the advisory council has 15 members with expertise in artificial intelligence, data analytics, oceanography, astrophysics, psychology, anthropology, biology and scientific instrumentation. The roster reportedly also includes scientists, UFO activists, a billionaire, retired Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet and billionaire Ben Lamm, underscoring the uneasy blend of technical expertise and public fascination around the issue.

Loeb has cast the work as an investigative exercise rather than a leap toward extraterrestrial conclusions. He said he is approaching the subject from a national-security perspective and starting from the assumption that the objects are human-made. He also described the effort as “like a detective story,” while arguing that better government data collection could eventually settle the long-running alien debate.

The federal case for more scrutiny has grown alongside the paper trail. ODNI said three public releases of UAP records have pushed the total number of publicly available files to nearly 300. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office said in its fiscal 2024 consolidated annual report that it received 757 UAP reports between May 1, 2023 and June 1, 2024, a tally that keeps the subject firmly in the national-security lane even as public curiosity remains high.

Loeb’s appointment has also revived criticism from within the scientific community. Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, said Loeb’s role casts doubt on the entire endeavor and faulted his methods for reaching sweeping conclusions about alien life without enough evidence or normal peer review. That tension now sits at the center of the White House effort: a formal review built to look empirical, led by a scientist whose celebrity was made by one of the field’s most controversial claims.