Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, known for controversial claims about alien technology, has been named to lead the White House-backed UAP Science Advisory Council, a multidisciplinary body tasked with advising the federal government on unidentified anomalous phenomena.
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has been appointed to lead the UAP Science Advisory Council, a body established jointly by the White House, the Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and the broader intelligence community.
The Council is charged with delivering scientific reports and recommendations to the UAP Governing Board, with the stated objective of resolving "the nature of UAP" — the government's preferred term for unidentified anomalous phenomena, formerly known as UFOs.
Loeb's formal credentials are substantial. A long-tenured Harvard astrophysicist, he has assembled a multidisciplinary team for the Council that includes not only physicists but also a pathologist, a computer scientist, a philosopher, a psychologist, and the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine.
His appointment, however, comes with significant baggage in the scientific community. Loeb has drawn sustained criticism from fellow researchers, some of whom have characterized him as a fraud, a crackpot, and a grifter — descriptions that have circulated widely in peer commentary in recent years.
Loeb has been making contested claims about extraterrestrial life since at least 2015. He is perhaps best known for asserting that Oumuamua — the interstellar object detected passing through the solar system — was not an exo-comet but an alien probe. He also claimed that small metal spheres recovered from the ocean floor were wreckage from an alien spacecraft.
Those claims have earned Loeb frequent television appearances while largely alienating him from mainstream academia, underscoring a tension at the center of his selection: the White House has chosen a figure with elite institutional credentials who has repeatedly staked those credentials on conclusions his peers reject.
The UAP Science Advisory Council sits beneath the UAP Governing Board, a structure reflecting the federal government's broader effort to institutionalize the study of unexplained aerial and atmospheric observations. The involvement of the FBI and the intelligence community alongside defense and science agencies signals a scope that extends beyond purely academic inquiry.
Whether Loeb's leadership will lend the Council credibility with the scientific establishment — or further complicate its reception — remains an open question as the body begins its mandate to provide formal scientific guidance on one of the government's more unusual standing priorities.
Marc Sabatini is a staff writer at TechEchelon covering enterprise software, cybersecurity, and the regulatory beats that shape both. He focuses on the deal flow and policy decisions that move markets.
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