Trump Promised The Truth About Ufos. These Scientists Are Waiting.

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — In late August, Avi Loeb, the world’s most renowned scientist hunting for extraterrestrials on earth, traveled to the inner sanctum of American intelligence operations in McLean, Virginia, looking for once-secret information.

Loeb’s meeting at the headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an unremarkable building that could easily pass for a suburban insurance company office, was the kind where a mysterious person introduces themself by first name alone and sits off to the side, observing on behalf of parts of the government with covert employees. The top official at the meeting was Aaron Lukas, the deputy director of national intelligence.

About two months earlier, Loeb had been appointed by President Donald Trump to be a kind of extraterrestrial czar with a mandate to apply scientific rigor to get to the bottom of whether what used to be called UFOs are evidence of unearthly intelligence. To fulfill the job, Loeb needs the intelligence agencies and military branches to provide any data they harbor of possible alien technology or visitation on Earth that has long been kept classified, if it does exist.

Loeb thought Lukas had gotten the ball rolling in July by granting intelligence agency employees and contractors a penalty-free zone to share the information in their possession. But he had received no new data then or since. This meeting at ODNI was meant, at least on Loeb’s side, to get the ball rolling faster.

Given the tenor of the meeting, said one member of Loeb’s team who attended the meeting and was granted anonymity to speak about the sensitive discussions, there is reason to think that may now actually happen.

“It’s just amazing to think that months into this, we’ve gotten nothing,” said the member. “I believe that’s about to change.”

ODNI did not respond to requests for comment.

Loeb is, indisputably, a titan in the field of astrophysics. Earning his PhD at the age of 24, he is the longest serving astronomy chair in the history of Harvard University. He’s authored more than a thousand scientific papers in astrophysics and cosmology. When a physicist with a hyper-narrow specialty interviewed for a post-doc position, he expected to have to explain his work to Loeb; instead, he told me, Loeb lobbed a precision question that set him on a promising new research direction, possibly for years. It’s the kind of story physicists frequently tell about Loeb.

Loeb is also as controversial as he is revered, in no small part because he has embraced a search for evidence of extraterrestrial life in a way that the scientific establishment considers unfashionable, even gauche. That is, Loeb doesn’t listen for radio signals encoding prime numbers sent from distant galaxies or search for primitive microbes on Mars. He’s interested in darting orbs in the stratosphere, possible evidence of alien spacecraft and unexplained technology signatures in the sky. These so-called UAPs — Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, the term that has replaced the traditional but stigmatized UFO abbreviation — could be signs that non-human intelligence exists not just somewhere else in the universe, but that, in fact, they’ve already been here on Earth, at some time, in some way. Or that they are here right now.

Loeb co-founded and runs Harvard’s high profile Galileo Project, which deploys banks of AI-powered sensors on the ground in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York and Nevada to search for objective signs of extraterrestrial technology in the skies. He’s been all over national media for years; he’s been given the big profile treatment by The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian. His critics accuse him of being a bit of a showboat and say he’s too quick to see evidence of aliens before fully excluding other possibilities.

The UAP transparency effort began after Trump issued an order on social media in February, responding, he wrote, to “tremendous interest” to declassify government UAP files. The newly designated UAP Science Council, an assembly of scientists and other UAP experts, was created in June under the auspices of ODNI and Loeb was named chair. Loeb says he reports to the White House, the Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI and is tasked with reviewing and testing existing government-collected data to determine whether aliens or their technology are on Earth.

The moment feels precipitous for many UAP researchers. Congressional hearings in 2022saw the Navy release startling video footage of unexplained orbs, for example. For some, those hearings merely ramped up an urgency established by a New York Times investigation in 2017 that exposed a tangled story of a shadowy Pentagon program, government cover-ups, a whistleblower and credible reports of alien-origin technology signatures on earth. In 2021 the ODNI publicly confirmed that U.S. intelligence agencies have classified 143 incidents as UAPs, and hundreds of unresolved cases are added annually, most of which are classified or simply held as if they are.

At the Aug. 31 meeting, ODNI informed the UAP council that the government has a concrete preparedness plan in place should the existence of non-human intelligence be confirmed, UAP council member Jennice Vilhauer recently disclosed in her Substack. She wrote that, "We do not know which agencies would lead the response, what circumstances would activate it, or whether it addresses the psychological and societal impact of such information." She underscored that a preparedness plan does not mean that the government necessarily believes confirmation is imminent, but she interpreted it as a sign of seriousness about the possibility.

What’s more, there is a growing stream of intriguing chatter from people who had or have higher than top secret clearances who normally would not be expected to indulge in UAP speculation; for example, former President Barack Obama talking about the credibility of UAP sightings on the Late Late Show with James Corden. Members of the Trump administration like Secretary of State Marco Rubio have a record of interest in UAP transparency. A raucous commotion of influencers, podcasters, MAGA-friendly cable news personalities, and the very online have long agitated for the government to come clean on what it knows; it’s the kind of deep state-countering, coastal-elite-upsetting, conspiracy-adjacent rabble-rousing that the second Trump administration has a record of responding to.

As the scientist to run it, Loeb is a logical choice for this administration: Already leading the Galileo Project efforts, he offers the kind of public-facing showmanship that Trump is well known to admire. He is impeccably credentialed while also being a poke in the eye of the scientific establishment. And he’s a Harvard professor willing to collaborate with the Trump administration.

“The president knows more about it than people thinks he does,” said a UAP expert who has had discussions with people with direct knowledge of Trump’s concerns and was granted anonymity to describe those conversations. He noted that Trump himself seems to believe the government has evidence of non-human technology and wants the truth to come out: “It’s enough to leave him disturbed about what to do.”

In a statement, a White House spokesperson said, “President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history, which is why he directed the Department of War to identify and release government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena, and unidentified flying objects. The administration continues to release files as they become available, and the public can make up their own minds about the information uncovered.”

However, at the supernova center of Loeb’s mission radiates a persistent doubt about whether the government will actually release the data it has been holding on to. It’s been months already with little to show. Will Trump force reluctant intelligence agencies to relinquish what nearly everybody across academia involved in the scientific inquiry into extraterrestrial life believes is meaningful raw data? Will that material be made public? How will any revelations be communicated to the public?

Loeb doesn’t have the answer to any of these questions. Yet.

“There is the possibility that they are baffled by the data,” Loeb told me. “Or,” he added, his voice trailing off, “it could be they are using me.”

Loeb’s interest in national security is career-spanning. He came to the United States in the 1980s after serving in the Israeli army in a physically grueling special forces unit, as a newly minted PhD at the behest of the Department of Defense to help with Ronald Reagan’s proposed space-based missile defense system (an idea revived in Trump’s second term as the Golden Dome airspace missile shield).

National security, as Loeb sees it, is at the center of his UAP work. And it’s hard to argue that not knowing whether an object in the skies came from China or is from a non-human civilization surveilling us from an exoplanet (astronomers have identified more than 6,300 such worlds outside this solar system) is anybody’s idea of secure borders.

For his UAP council, Loeb has assembled a cast of senior scientists, esteemed academics, and promising post-docs. There’s a philosopher of science, a retired Navy admiral, and a billionaire working on bringing extinct animals to life. If the film rights are ever sold, the cast might look like character actors assembled in Hercule Poirot’s drawing room, each with idiosyncratic passions and an unusual origin story for having interest in finding evidence of aliens on Earth.

The council meets every week over Zoom. In addition to spending a day with Loeb at Harvard’s astrophysics center, Loeb granted me access to interview members of the council and invited me to sit in on one of their calls, which has the feeling of a faculty department meeting before the semester begins. Until they receive government data, time is spent giving member updates and anticipating what is to come. The meeting I attended segued into a discussion of the confounding phenomenon of ball lightening — dazzling fireballs shooting through the air that have eluded scientific explanation. Observers across continents and centuries — one was Russian Tsar Nicholas II, who insisted a fiery ball landed next to him when he was a young boy inside a church — have claimed sightings and described the same sulfurous smell. Yet without much in the way of video evidence and so far unable to recreate or explain it, scientists long insisted the whole thing was folklore; only recently has a consensus emerged that ball lightening is probably more fact than fiction.

So, too, UAP inquiry, the council members are quick to point out, shouldn’t be scoffed at. Many of the council members told me in separate interviews that after so many reports, it’s preposterous that there is nothing in the government archives that merits mainstream institutional scrutiny. Is there really no data collected by the military or government agencies to investigate, nothing at all to look at? For these council members — and the UAP-interested community at large — the animating belief isn’t that there’s necessarily been a government cover-up but simply that there’s data that hasn’t been investigated. Like with ball lightening, they say an absence of proof doesn’t mean case closed.

“The UAP denialists are now the conspiracy theorists,” quipped Richard Cloete, a Harvard postdoctoral computer scientist who helps design and deploy AI-enabled sensors for the Galileo Project, and a member of the UAP council.

Members of the council worry they may be risking their reputations by participating. Even as curiosity among scientists increasingly outpaces skepticism or indifference, according to a 2023 research paper, stigma around the topic of aliens unquestionably persists. After years of academic physics at the most elite level, Devesh Nandal, a Harvard post-doc who researches stars, told me he’s concerned that joining the UAP council will torpedo his chances to land a university professor job. “People doing science — you expect them to be paragons of virtue, and a lot of them live up to this, but it's not always like that.”

It will be a devastating indictment on the practice of science if the mere question of whether there is an alien presence on earth continues to be deemed illegitimate, said Garry Nolan, a founder of multiple biotech companies, a professor of pathology at Stanford University and a council member who could help evaluate potential biological traces of alien life. “It’s the debunkers who are frauds,” he argued, “because they come to the table with preordained conclusions.” In this theory of the case, the UAP council is a crucial test of whether the American scientific establishment is still in the business of free inquiry.

To criticism that they are too eager to find proof of alien life, UAP council members counter that whatever concerns are warranted, scientific integrity isn’t one of them. Instead, people should worry that “disruptive science is in decline,” said Loeb. Neutral to research outcomes, the council is committed to showing its work, Loeb insisted, and submitting to peer review.

“The problem here isn’t about good science versus bad science,” said Peter Skafish, a cultural anthropologist on the UAP council. “The question is whether there is data that is amenable to the scientific process, and whether we are given the opportunity to evaluate declassified records, assessments of events, and even records, should we be able to get them, from classified programs.”

Skafish and Nolan co-founded the Sol Foundation, a think tank that “brings together experts from academia and government to address the philosophical, policy and scientific problems raised by the likely presence on the Earth of UAP.” They launched Sol in 2023 after Congress held the UAP hearings that galvanized new attention on the aliens-are-here hypothesis.

Since then, speculation has turned to Washington and its bureaucracy — to interagency rivalries, to the undertow of political resistance to disclosure, and to the integrity of available data — all of which will likely determine the council’s success. For example, there is near unanimity among UAP researchers that the Navy is more open to releasing UAP data than is the Air Force. And there’s a fervently held consensus that there is one intelligence agency most strongly resisting UAP data disclosure…

“The CIA,” Nolan said. “In my personal opinion, nemesis is the word I would use for them in the past.”

“My government sources always point back to CIA,” said Skafish.

Allies, said Nolan, are more readily available in the much smaller staff ranks of the ODNI, an umbrella department with authority over the government’s 17 different intelligence agencies, including the CIA. “The people in ODNI who I have interacted with seem truthful. Maybe they’re the best actors in the world, I don’t have a lie detector in my head, but they seem to want to be honest about it,” he said.

“We know there is an extremely classified effort within the IC” — the intelligence community — “where they know there are technologies that are not of human provenance,” Skafish told me. It would be “an extremely heavy lift” for any president to overcome all the layers of resistance to that disclosure.

The White House spokesperson denied that the CIA has resisted the promised disclosures. "These claims about the CIA are completely false," the spokesperson said. "All relevant agencies have worked cooperatively with PURSUE in order to identify records that are responsive to the President's initiative and of interest to the American public."

Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez also pushed back on the notion that any part of the armed services is resisting disclosure of information about UAPs. “The Department has taken the lead on UAP transparency … and continues to work diligently to fulfill that mandate,” Valdez said in a statement. “All service branches are involved in the ongoing work of declassifying UAP files and have been working at the direction of Secretary [Pete] Hegseth to support maximum transparency.”

"CIA fully participates in the White House's PURSUE Task Force and is committed to supporting President Trump's transparency initiatives by providing access to the relevant intelligence,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement, using the acronym for the UAP government disclosure initiative called the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters.

For members of the UAP council, the level of coordination between agencies required to get the data they want suggests it will be an uphill climb without direct intervention from the president and his top advisers in the Oval Office. Last spring, ODNI established an interagency governance board to manage the declassification process; its members and procedures have not been disclosed, and it’s unclear whether it has the power to order data releases over the objections of the agency or department holding it.

“The process goes from the Science Advisory Council to a governance board and then to the ODNI and then from ODNI to an individual agency, a long chain,” said Cloete, the computer scientist. “Without forcing anyone, why would they hand anything over? How does it benefit the CIA?”

UAPs seem to be on the minds of Trump’s inner circle. On July 15, Vice President JD Vance went on an extended riff on Joe Rogan’s podcast about the likelihood of extraterrestrial versus extra-ecclesiastical life on earth, eventually conceding that there could be angels, demons and aliens converging on this planet all at once.

On Aug. 11, MAGA podcaster Katie Miller asked Rubio what conspiracy theories he endorsed. Disclaiming belief in any conspiracy, Rubio nonetheless offered, “I have long been on this UAP thing, and now I’ve sort of surrendered that portfolio to someone else who you know well” — Katie Miller is married to Trump deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller — “who’s very much in charge of the UAP issue.” Adding, “There are things flying over our military installations and they’re not ours, and we should look into this, be serious about it.”

Others have pointed to Miller as driving the White House’s maximum transparency zeal. “Stephen Miller is the White House authority on UAP transparency,” Skafish told me. “He’s empowered officials across executive branch agencies to investigate UAP and government UAP secrecy. These are serious concerns for him.”

Setting the UAP chatter in motion was Trump’s Feb. 19 Truth Social post “directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”

Since then, six tranches of material have been released to the public, the first in May and the last on Sept. 18. These declassified files from the military and NASA, the FBI and intelligence agencies were extensive, containing video and audio clips, military letters, artist renderings and infrared data from government aircraft, some of which had previously been disclosed to the public or to Congress. Council members have used several of the videos as illustrations for papers, but the tranches didn’t include the vital raw data — velocity and distance of objects, for instance — the council has requested and says is critical for their work.

Still, the bureaucratic gears continue to turn. On Sept.14, the Pentagon took a baby step by issuing its own legal waiver protecting personnel and contractors from legal liability or loss of security clearances as a consequence of disclosing UAP information. The waiver “establishes an authorized pipeline for systematic review, security evaluation, and potential declassification of historical and ongoing UAP data in furtherance of national mission objectives.”

For its part, the FBI has established a “UAP working group,” a kind of internal affairs squad estimated to be about 20 or 25 dedicated agents tasked with locating unclassified UAP files across government agencies and military branches and bringing them to the ODNI, and eventually to Loeb and his council.

But “all 13,000 field agents are supposed to contributing to the UAP effort, it’s now part of their job description,” said Alexander Wendt, Mershon Professor of International Security and Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University and author of a forthcoming book on UFOs and the potential threat to global security. “Some are being very aggressive about it; some are treating it like a joke. It’s by no means uniform.”

Loeb gives his council until the end of the calendar year to receive meaningful data from the government. At that point, he might need to reassess the situation. But he’s hopeful that Trump’s penchant for declassification of intelligence files, the precedence of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, and this era’s mania for disclosure of secrets can conspire to give him the data he seeks. Loeb also supports efforts by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) to pass an amendment to the defense appropriations bill, called the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act, to create a second UAP council that is empowered to access classified data and has broad subpoena power over agencies and government contractors to force them to turn over files.

“There’s a danger this could become a Pandora’s Box that opens up all kinds of other questions that people demand from the agencies, but politicians are coming together because they’ve seen evidence — evidence something is going on,” said Nolan, the Stanford scientist.

On a Monday in late July, Loeb concluded a basement lunch meeting with members of his Galileo Project team. Arrays of sensors splayed around Las Vegas have been scanning the Nevada skies — “the sky is not classified,” Loeb noted — and now the team was installing sensors around the house where Carl Sagan once lived in Ithaca, New York.

Next came a meeting in his office with Anita Goel, a dual physicist and physician from Harvard and MIT and chairman and CEO of Nanobiosym, a company that focuses on integrating physics, biomedicine and nanotechnology. The two discussed whether we’d even know what an alien is when we encountered it — whether an “experimental signature” could reveal a life form, a technology, or something else altogether.

“The burning question in my mind is: How do we develop a hard-core physics definition of the boundary between living matter and inert matter, sentient versus non-sentient systems, and living intelligence versus artificial intelligence? Seems to me that’s also a burning question in the UAP field, so we know what signature we need to look for and what kind of sensors we will need to design,” Goel said.

“How do you tell the difference between a living system and a machine?” Loeb responded. “By the way, NASA doesn’t even have a good definition of life.”

“Same with DARPA,” said Goel. “We are going to need to ask: What is life? What is intelligence? What is technological intelligence versus natural intelligence? You’re touching on the same forbidden territory I am.”

Loeb has walked a tightrope since the council’s formation, with critics baring fangs in national media; council members worrying that the Trump administration may announce alien revelations to distract from a bad news cycle; and hostility within Harvard toward working with the Trump administration, not currently regarded as a hero organization on campus.

“All facets of my identity have been attacked at the same time,” said Loeb. “I have realized the strongest force in science is jealousy. I’ve been at Harvard for 33 years. I’m Israeli and right now the far right and the far left have sentiments against Israel. And I’m a scientist. All these are being attacked. My skin is made of titanium right now.”

Loeb lifted his head toward his office wall covered by portraits of renowned physicists. “But suppose we find evidence of alien technology, suddenly a huge amount of money will be poured into science.”

What will happen if the UAP council announces aliens are real and they are here? It may be something much more altering than raining research dollars. Wendt believes it would cause a profound social and political rupture. Wendt supports the data collection efforts of Loeb’s Galileo Project but is a fierce critic of Loeb’s leadership of the UAP advisory group.

“The good news is they’re not going to get any data,” Wendt told me, arguing that resistance from the military and intelligence agencies cannot be overcome. The bad news, however, is if the council does get its data and announces the presence of alien intelligence on earth, Wendt believes it’s almost certainly the end of civilization as we know it.

“Not because of war against them, because of war between humans,” he said.

The way Wendt sees it, merely discovering that we’re not alone in the universe will not produce a global ontological shock. But finding out that aliens are here, on this planet, and they’re smarter than us, will. That sheer fact will upend everything: the legitimacy of national borders, the assertion of governments’ monopoly over national security, the authority of experts, religious leaders, politicians — upheaval that will ripple through everybody and everything. Not to mention the possibility of a race to harness the aliens’ superior technology.

“It’s not non-human intelligence that’s the problem. Dogs have non-human intelligence. The problem is superior intelligence,” says Wendt, who is not a member of the council. “You can’t just announce something like that out of the blue. And I don’t think Avi Loeb has thought much about that.”

In response, Loeb wrote to me that, “I am fully aligned with the U.S. government's approach to disclosure and will follow their guidelines on the way that any information on non-human intelligence will be released to the public. My primary goal is to assist the White House, the Pentagon, the FBI, the ODNI and the Intelligence Community, in figuring out the nature of UAP using the scientific method. This means using evidence to resolve the pending mystery in the same way that a detective solves a case.”

Wendt would like to see a 25-to-50-year news blackout to prepare the public. “The threat of global panic is real. This is what Hobbes wrote about. It’s a fundamentally political problem before it’s a scientific one.”

That’s why Wendt is among those who think the administration’s motives for establishing the UAP council are mostly political: “It’s a diversionary tactic was my first thought. It would help distract the public about Iran or whatever else, and that certainly still seems plausible to me,” he said.

Wendt is not the only person who thinks the council and its potentially world-shattering findings might be used as a diversion. I wrote an email to Loeb alerting him to a column in The New York Times speculating that Trump might announce that the deep state is aware of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence on earth, noting there are “UFO people” who want this kind of disclosure to come before the midterms.

Loeb wrote back: “If there is clear evidence beyond a reasonable doubt for alien tech, this will constitute the biggest scientific discovery ever made and the most important milestone in human history.” Then dryly, “The relevance to the midterm elections is secondary.”

Others say that the whole topic is too “out there” to have real political impact.

“I was having dinner with my family last night and telling my dad about working with Avi, and he said, ‘Are you kidding Liberty? Have you lost your mind?’” said Liberty Vittert Capito, a data scientist at Washington University in Saint Louis and member of the UAP council. “To think that we’re the distraction from Iran and [Jeffrey] Epstein? I wouldn’t put us in charge of the news cycle.”

Astrobiologist and meteorologist Jacob Haqq-Misra, a member of both the Academy of Astronautics and the UAP council, said that what scientists fear is the loss of control that could result from the hunt for UAPs on earth. In fact, the International Academy of Astronautics is developing protocols on how to handle the discovery of alien life, such as when and how to notify the United Nations.

“If we find there’s superior extraterrestrial technology in the solar system, that we’re not alone and we don’t know their motives, this is what unsettles even my science colleagues,” he said.

Loeb, of course, sees things differently. There are no good or bad answers to a scientific question, he insists.

“The foundation of science is the humility to learn, not the arrogance of expertise,” he said. “We must adapt to wherever the evidence leads us. If we discover alien tech, it would demonstrate that we are not at the top of the cosmic food chain. And we really need this dose of cosmic modesty.”