The Government Just Put a Science Team on the UAP File. The Skeptic Is on It Too.

An ODNI representative showed up at Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb's door. That visit became the founding moment of the UAP Science Advisory Council. Loeb's response, in his own words: "They had me at hello." The U.S. government now has a formal scientific body advising it on unidentified aerial phenomena, and it reports straight to the top.

The council feeds its conclusions upward to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and an oversight board drawing from across the national security apparatus: AARO, the White House, the FBI, and the broader intelligence community. The membership spans astrophysics, oceanography, molecular biology, anthropology, psychology and artificial intelligence.

There's a catch built right into the structure. The council will not have access to classified UAP material; it will focus instead on archival sources, including recent Pentagon releases. And the oversight board the council reports to? The specific members are being kept secret — some are government employees doing classified work who prefer not to be identified. A science advisory council that can't see the classified data, reporting to a board whose members are themselves classified. That's the least surprising sentence in this story.

The council is not intended to be an echo chamber. Shermer, who edits Skeptic magazine and has spent years pushing back on extraordinary UAP claims, sits on the council. He says his role is to keep the group grounded and focused on established scientific consensus.

The infrastructure and programs are real and documented. What they find is another matter entirely.

Read the full story at Scientific American, July 1, 2026

Hot Take: A transparency initiative that classifies its own oversight board and withholds classified evidence from its science advisors isn't quite what the word "transparency" is built to do, but at least they finally put the skeptic in the room.