WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House has selected a well-known but controversial Harvard astronomer — one who has made headlines with bold claims about alien visits — to lead a new team of outside scientists examining the national security risks associated with UFOs.
Avi Loeb, a cosmologist who spent years studying black holes and led Harvard’s astronomy department until 2020, has been appointed to head a newly formed scientific advisory council. The group is charged with investigating the origins of mysterious orbs and other unexplained objects that military personnel have reported encountering in recent years. The appointment is part of President Donald Trump’s broader effort to declassify more government information on the topic.
Loeb’s team will report directly to a new White House panel dedicated to UFOs — now more commonly called unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP.
Describing the work ahead, Loeb compared it to solving a mystery. “It’s like a detective story,” he said in an interview. “It’s a lot of fun, as long as you don’t pay too much attention to the critics.”
For the past ten years, Loeb has been searching the skies and oceans for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. His quest began in 2017 when scientists were puzzled by an interstellar object passing through our solar system. While most researchers believed it was a comet or a chunk of ice, Loeb proposed it could be a thin “light sail” that had broken away from an alien spacecraft.
His ideas have earned him a following in UFO communities, but they have frequently put him at odds with his academic colleagues. Fellow astronomers have accused him of making extraordinary claims backed by little evidence, and some have taken issue with his tendency to bypass the peer review process and take his findings directly to the general public.
Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University who has pushed back against some of Loeb’s ideas, argues that Loeb relies on flawed methods to reach far-fetched conclusions about alien life — all while dismissing a more established scientific field dedicated to searching for life beyond our planet.
Desch said Loeb’s involvement with the White House panel casts a shadow over the entire effort. “I don’t know what’s going to come of this, but we’re not going to get any closer to answering these questions with him in charge,” Desch said.
Loeb dismisses his critics, saying they simply lack the imagination to entertain new possibilities. He has promised a grounded, methodical approach to his White House work, saying he is starting his analysis of UAP with the assumption that they are human-made, framing the investigation through a national security lens.
Still, he sees potential for something much larger. If the government commits to better data collection on UAPs, Loeb believes it could ultimately settle the debate over alien life once and for all.
The team Loeb assembled includes more than a dozen scientists and UFO advocates. Among them is Timothy Gallaudet, a retired rear admiral who has publicly warned about UAP allegedly controlled by “nonhuman intelligence” and claimed the U.S. has recovered crashed aircraft. Also on the team is Ben Lamm, a billionaire involved in efforts to bring extinct species back to life.
Following the group’s first meeting last month, the team submitted a request to the Pentagon seeking more than 50 videos, images, and other documents tied to known UAP incidents. While the group meets privately, Loeb has pledged to keep the public informed and plans to launch a website to share the team’s findings.
“At a time when science is not so much celebrated, this is an opportunity to actually do good for all sides involved,” Loeb said.
Earlier this year, Trump directed his administration to increase transparency around UFOs and the question of alien life. To date, the Pentagon has released three sets of files, ranging from decades-old FBI reports to more recent military footage showing orbs moving through the sky in unusual ways.
Trump’s directive resulted in the creation of a UAP Governance Board, overseen by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That board convened for the first time in June and is supported by Loeb’s advisory team along with several other groups, according to the office.
The move comes as a bipartisan group of lawmakers in Congress pushes the White House to go even further, with some Republicans amplifying claims that the government has concealed evidence of alien encounters. The White House has encouraged anyone with relevant information to come forward. Meanwhile, a Pentagon office that investigates UAP has stated it has found no evidence of alien life.
Loeb said he does not believe in cover-up theories. “My impression is the government is baffled by not being able to infer the nature of some of these objects,” he said.
Before his alien-focused work brought him widespread attention, Loeb was a respected cosmologist who authored hundreds of academic papers, with expertise in black holes and the formation of galaxies. He chaired Harvard’s astronomy department for nearly a decade.
His career shifted direction in 2017 with his “light sail” theory, which he later expanded into a book. He subsequently founded the Galileo Project at Harvard, an initiative aimed at searching for physical evidence left behind by alien civilizations.
In 2023, Loeb’s team attracted significant attention when they used magnets to pull hundreds of tiny metallic spheres from the floor of the Pacific Ocean, near the suspected location of a 2014 meteor impact. After studying the so-called “spherules,” Loeb suggested they may have originated from a distant planet or possibly from alien technology. Other researchers disputed the claim, arguing the material was most likely volcanic rock or coal ash.
Sean Kirkpatrick, a physicist who previously led UAP investigations at the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, said Loeb is “not viewed favorably” within the scientific community and does not have a background in national security. Kirkpatrick said the composition of Loeb’s team signals that the White House may be more interested in fringe theories than rigorous science.
The White House did not respond when asked to comment on the criticism.
As for Loeb, he says he intends to stay focused on the evidence and tune out the noise. “Let’s keep our eyes on the orbs,” he said, “not the social media.”
