United States.UAP Science Advisory Council · Loeb (Jun 12, 2026)

On June 12, 2026 —the same day as the third batch of releases from the PURSUE portal— Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb announced that the White House, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the FBI, along with other members of the Intelligence Community, had asked him to assemble and chair a new UAP Science Advisory Council. Loeb —who leads the Galileo Project and sits on the Disclosure Foundation's advisory board— presented it on his blog and through the foundation's channels as a body to bring scientific rigor to the study of the phenomenon.

The council is organized around a core data team: Dr. Richard Cloete and Dr. Regina Sarmiento (data analysis and management with AI), Prof. Matthew Szydagis (instrumentation and data collection), Dr. Devesh Nandal (numerical analysis and astrophysics) and Dr. Omer Eldadi (data management, AI and human psychology). Around them, the rosters reported in the press and by Loeb himself include a broader panel of deliberately varied profiles: Stanford immunologist and materials scientist Garry Nolan and retired Rear Admiral and oceanographer Tim Gallaudet —both already associated with phenomenon research— alongside philosopher of science Carol Cleland (anomaly identification), economist and theorist Robin Hanson (statistics and economics), physicist Kevin Knuth (physics and instrumentation) and others (Ben Lamm, Peter Skafish, Ross Howard). Coverage such as Skeptic magazine's also reported the inclusion of declared skeptic Michael Shermer; exact lists vary across sources, but all agree on a mix of skeptics and advocates presented as a signal of methodological neutrality. The council's existence was covered by specialized defense press (DefenseScoop) and general outlets, alongside Loeb's and the Disclosure Foundation's channels.

The stated mandate is to help agencies study the nature of UAP with scientific method, emphasizing the collection and analysis of new, high-quality data rather than relitigating old material that cannot be independently verified. The announcement coincided with the mid-2026 release ecosystem: three batches of UAP files (May 8, May 22 and June 12) and an AARO report dated June 5, 2026 and signed by its director, Dr. Jon Kosloski. However, mid-June coverage flagged a tension at its very origin: the council's scientists reportedly are not cleared to see the classified UAP files held by the same agencies that created it. The council is thus born as a layer of scientific credibility over a body of evidence to which its own panel lacks full access.

The roster grew quickly: by July 11, 2026 it had gone from 5 to 18 members, recruited largely from Loeb's Harvard academic circle, as reported by The Harvard Crimson. On July 31, the ODNI issued preliminary guidance —a memo from then-Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Eron Lucas— instructing current and former personnel to report UAP information to AARO and the PURSUE task force 'notwithstanding' prior NDAs, though it clarifies this does not authorize public disclosure or disclosure to Congress outside those channels. In early August, Loeb questioned the guidance's legal scope on his personal blog —asking whether an NDA can legally exclude the Commander-in-Chief— a critical but pro-disclosure stance, not an objection to the council. On August 21, 2026, the council's official X account (@uapsac) posted a statement backing the Trump administration's actions toward UAP whistleblowers, in the same window in which Rep. Eric Burlison's office launched its own NDA-waiver intake form (see ↗). The full text of that statement could not be accessed from this environment —X returned a payment-required error on fetch attempts—; the finding is recorded from the headline and link confirmed by a specialized UAP news aggregator, not as an independently verified direct quote.

It is the first time the U.S. government has formally embedded a scientific advisory council —chaired by a public advocate of the scientific search for the phenomenon— within UAP governance, alongside AARO, ODNI and the FBI. Its most notable trait is its ideological breadth: bringing declared skeptics (Shermer) and advocates (Nolan, Gallaudet, Loeb himself) onto the same panel is a gesture of methodological neutrality rarely seen in the field. It enters the corpus as an institutional piece (document category), not as a UAP observation: it brings no evidence about the nature of the phenomenon but documents its scientific institutionalization, which is why it carries no Bayesian contribution to any hypothesis. What makes it relevant is its critical reading within the strategic-ambiguity pattern: creating a public-facing science body while withholding access to the classified files reproduces the PURSUE mold —a credibility channel without the decisive piece of evidence—. It is at once the strongest institutional acknowledgment that the phenomenon merits rigorous science and a case study in the limits the security apparatus imposes on that science. The August 21 endorsement of the administration's whistleblower actions does not resolve that access tension —the council still cannot see the classified files— but it does mark a convergence: the scientific and legislative (Burlison) tracks of the 2026 disclosure ecosystem end up aligned on the same agenda, even as they advance through separate channels.