Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Avi Loeb on why he agreed to agreed to lead a council on UFOs and national security:

https://nypost.com/2026/07/19/opinion/wh...-security/

Quote:A month ago, I was visited by a representative from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). He raised a simple question.

“Would you be willing to establish and lead a new advisory council for the US Government on the science of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena?” In other words, would I head a council on UFOs. I responded: “You had me at ‘hello.’”...

The identification of UAP is crucial to the protection of national security. As a US citizen, I feel obligated to help the ODNI and the Pentagon in this mission. Moreover, if one in a million UAP happens to have a non-human origin, this will constitute the biggest cosmic discovery ever made by humanity.

The request from ODNI was unusual for several reasons. First, how often do government employees admit they cannot fulfill their duties and ask scientists for help? Second, implicit in the request was the admission that the US military’s best sensors are currently unable to identify adequately flying objects. The most plausible explanation for these mysteries is that they are manufactured by adversarial nations. That makes them a security threat. Why can’t we identify them?...

The government is constantly monitoring the entire sky. It struggles to interpret all the signals picked up by its many advanced sensors. But history tells us that these sensors contain invaluable information. That’s where scientists come in...

I chose the size and makeup of the council carefully. It is not so small as to lack sufficient expertise nor too big as to trigger regression to the mean. I selected brilliant scientists with expertise in physics, oceanography, data analysis, statistics, and psychology. All are open-minded enough to go wherever the evidence guides us. I also included a skeptic of alien technologies to ensure there are no biases in the analysis and to make sure our conclusions are beyond doubt.

The council is not starting with any conclusion in mind. The “Unknown” part of UAP does not necessarily mean extraterrestrial. But we cannot discount the possibility that it might, and we should not explain away such possibilities without evidence.

The nature of UAP is a detective story. We will solve it by collecting new clues and reexamining old ones in new ways...

The UAP Science Advisory Council website:

https://uapsac.com/