Avi Loeb didn’t need a sales pitch. A rep from the Office of the Director of National Intel visited him. He signed up. Now he sits on the UAP Science Advisory Council. Its job is to look at unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs). The White House wants answers.
“They had me at hello.”
This isn’t just a hobby club. It signals something bigger. UAPs aren’t fringe anymore. They are in the Senate buildings. They are on the news. On Thursday last week, the Disclosure Forum packed into the Senate office in D.C. Legislators sat in on panels discussing everything from national security to theology. If we prove these things are alien, what then? What if they aren’t even from our dimension?
Loeb runs the Galileo Project at Harvard. He leads the hunt. But the Council itself has no money. Just travel reimbursement. That’s it. Loeb wants to avoid an echo chamber. So he recruited a skeptic.
Michael Shermer runs Skeptic magazine. He hates bad ideas. He joins to keep everyone grounded. To force the science.
Shermer says most members are open. Really open. Not just to space aliens. They are considering time bubbles. Multi-dimensional beings. Future humans visiting us.
Shermer laughs. Hard.
“Pretty much everyone on the committee… I wouldn’t even bother down that road.” He says those ideas violate physics. He thinks they are nonsense.
The Council aims for prestige. They want their papers in peer-reviewed journals. Loeb argues the public space is full of junk. Unsubstantiated claims. Lies.
“There might be some diamonds in the rough.”
They want to find those diamonds. To make the science real.
Then there is the psychology. Jennice Vilhauer, a LA psychologist, is on board. She looks at the witnesses. What happens to them? People see things. They stay silent. Five percent report their sightings. Why?
Stigma. Fear.
She wants to study that damage. The military ignores it. The clinicians dismiss it. That needs fixing.
But the primary duty? Reporting up.
The Council answers to the Intel community. A secret board. Representatives from the Pentagon. The FBI. The White House.
Loeb doesn’t know who is on that board. Classified work. Secrets.
Shermer guesses. Maybe Rep. Anna Paulina Luna? Maybe not. He suspects the government cares about tech, not aliens. If a UAP threatens security, that is interesting.
Shermer thinks most officials believe humans made them.
President Donald Trump is not on the board. Loeb has not met him. Trump promised to declassify files. Some videos hit the Pentagon site. Good enough?
“I don’t think he is directly involved,” Loeb said.
Senator Mike Rounds praised the transparency. Then he clammed up. Would the Council work with Congress?
“I honestly don’t know.”
The Council gets no classified briefs. Just the scraps. Videos. Photos. Old files.
Timothy Gallaudet is a Navy veteran. He sees the limitation. How do you reverse-engineer a mystery from a shaky cellphone clip? You don’t.
His goal? Calculate velocity. Map movement. Make recommendations for further study.
No guarantees. Maybe they find nothing.
Maybe they break physics.
Gallaudet allows for it.
“We might be learning some fundamental new principles.”
Silence remains.
