Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb tapped by Trump to lead UAP advisory council

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who was selected by the White House last month to lead a UFO advisory council, believes he was appointed because federal officials were “stunned” by the many unidentified objects the U.S. military had intercepted over the past few decades.

Loeb, known for suggesting that alien spacecraft may have already reached Earth, said his newly formed team of more than a dozen scientists reviewed four publicly available accounts of UFO sightings released by the Trump administration in recent months.

His mission began in early June, when an official from the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) visited his home and asked him to assemble a group of experts to understand UFOs, now called unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) by the U.S. government. This is an umbrella term that describes objects moving under water and in space.

“The US government said hello to me,” Loeb said in an interview with Fox News Digital on Saturday. “The fact that they’re reaching out to scientists like me shows, I think, that they’re blown away by what they’re seeing and think it’s not man-made.”

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Loeb’s council will report its findings to the UAP Board of Directors, a newly formed body under the direction of the ODNI.

according to council websiteLoeb and his colleagues will only review already declassified materials about UAPs.

But Loeb told Fox News Digital that he has requested 50 videos, images and other documents related to known UAP incidents from the Pentagon and other agencies. These materials have not yet been provided to him because custodians have cited national security concerns.

“The problem is not the targets. The sensors used were for national security purposes. The US government does not want to disclose the type of sensors used to hostile countries. So that is the main obstacle right now,” Loeb said.

A satellite image shows a UFO spacecraft at night amid FBI investigation and alien evidence near Area 51; It captures the galaxy survey of a flying saucer and a mysterious object in the sky. (Creators of Getty Images)

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Loeb’s goal is to understand whether the UAPs seized by the US military came from other countries or did not come from humans.

“In the second case, if it’s not man-made, then this is the greatest discovery science has ever made, and the U.S. government has the privilege of pioneering this new awareness that a neighbor is visiting us,” Loeb said.

Loeb tried to temper expectations by saying that many of the phenomena they study could become commonplace. Most of the time, the strange-looking objects people see in the sky are just space junk or broken satellites, he said.

“Unless they maneuver in a way that cannot be explained by gravity, you should assume that these are space debris,” Loeb said.

In 2014 and 2015, US Navy pilots reported multiple UFO sightings during training maneuvers.

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Still, he praised the White House for its efforts to ensure transparency on the issue. In February, President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon and other agencies to declassify files on aliens and UAPs due to “tremendous interest.”

One of the key goals of Loeb’s council is to recommend better sensors so the government can more confidently capture UAPs in the future.

“If we’re dealing with drones of unusual characteristics that the Chinese are using, it’s a good thing that the United States has better sensors that can help identify them. They’re currently being reported as spheres. These may not be drones, but I say at least we’re going to help national security,” Loeb said.

Loeb’s remarks come after the War Department made public the fourth and final batch of UAP supplies on Friday. Loeb commented on photographs from the Apollo 12 mission to the Moon in 1969, one of the first group’s most sensational publications.

There are five “unidentified phenomena” in one of the photos, but Loeb said federal officials have now officially concluded that the blue flashes are likely cosmic rays.

Picture of unidentified events on the moon during the 1969 Apollo 12 mission. (NASA)

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Loeb chaired Harvard University’s astronomy department until 2020, where he studied black holes, the formation of the universe’s first stars, and extraterrestrial life.

In 2017, when scientists discovered the remnant of a Pluto-like world in the Solar System, Loeb disputed these findings, arguing that the object was likely a light sail from an alien civilization.

After this claim earned him widespread respect in the UFO community, Loeb founded the Galileo Project at Harvard to search for artifacts of extraterrestrial civilizations.