White House taps the guy who keeps crying ‘aliens’ to run UFO group

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb will head the UAP Science Advisory Council established by the White House, the Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and “the intelligence community.” The Council will provide scientific reports and advice to the UAP Governing Board, in an effort to “resolve the nature of UAP,” or unidentified anomalous phenomena.

On paper, Loeb’s qualifications seem strong. And he’s surrounded himself with a team from a variety of backgrounds. The Council includes not only physicists, but a pathologist, a computer scientist, a philosopher, a psychologist, and even the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine.

In recent years, however, Loeb has garnered attention for repeatedly claiming evidence of aliens. This had landed him plenty of TV appearances, but others in the scientific community largely dismiss Loeb as a fraud, crackpot, and grifter.

His Harvard credentials and long career have granted him some legitimacy. But he’s been making questionable claims about alien life since at least 2015. Now he’s best known for suggesting that Oumuamua was not an exo-comet, but an alien probe; and that small metal spheres found in the ocean were the wreckage of an alien spacecraft.