Harvard astronomer tapped to lead White House UFO council says US government 'baffled by what they are seeing'

Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer who was chosen last month by the White House to lead a UFO advisory council, believes he was brought on because federal officials are "baffled" by the many unidentified objects the U.S. military has captured over the past several decades.

Loeb, known for arguing that alien spacecraft may have already reached Earth, said his newly-formed team of more than a dozen scientists is combing through four batches of public UFO sighting disclosures released by the Trump administration in recent months.

His mission began in early June when an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) visited his home and asked him to form a group of experts to make sense of UFOs — now referred to by the U.S. government as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). This is an umbrella term that accounts for objects seen zipping underwater and in space.

"The U.S. government had me at hello," Loeb told Fox News Digital in an interview on Saturday. "The fact that they are reaching out to scientists like myself indicates, in my mind, that they are baffled by what they are seeing, and they think that maybe it's not human-made."

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Avi Loeb speaks during the SALT conference in Manhattan, New York City, on September 14, 2022. (David 'Dee' Delgado)

Loeb's council will report its findings to the UAP Governing Board, a recently-established body under the direction of ODNI.

According to the council's website, Loeb and his colleagues will only be reviewing already-declassified materials on UAPs.

However, Loeb told Fox News Digital that he has asked the Pentagon and other agencies for 50 videos, images and other documents related to known UAP incidents. Those materials haven't been given to him yet, with the custodian agencies citing national security concerns.

"It's not so much the targets that are the issue. It's that the sensors that were used were for national security purposes. The U.S. government doesn't want to reveal to adversarial nations the kind of sensors being used. So that's the main obstacle right now," Loeb said.

A satellite image shows a UFO spaceship at night amid an FBI investigation and alien evidence near Area 51, capturing a flying saucer and galaxy survey of a mysterious object in the sky. (Getty Images Creatives)

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Loeb's goal is to figure out whether UAPs that have been captured by the U.S. military originate from other nations or if they don't come from humans at all.

"In the second case, if it's not human-made, then that's the biggest discovery ever made by science, and the U.S. government has the privilege of ushering in this new realization that we have a neighbor visiting us," Loeb said.

Loeb sought to temper expectations, saying that many of the phenomena they are studying could turn out to be mundane. Often, he said, the strange-looking objects people see in the sky are merely space junk or broken satellites.

"Unless they maneuver in ways that cannot be explained by gravity, you should assume that they are space junk," Loeb said.

In 2014 and 2015, pilots with the U.S. Navy reported multiple UFO sightings during training maneuvers.

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Nonetheless, he praised the White House for its push for transparency on this issue. In February, President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon and other agencies to declassify files related to aliens and UAPs because of "tremendous interest."

One of the most important aims of Loeb's council is to recommend better sensors so that the government can capture UAPs with more confidence in the future.

"If we are dealing with drones of some unusual qualities that the Chinese are using, it's good for the U.S. to have better sensors that can help it identify those. Right now, they are reported as orbs. They may not be drones, but I'm saying that at the very least, we will help national security," Loeb said.

Loeb's remarks come after the Department of War on Friday released the fourth and latest batch of UAP materials to the public. Loeb commented on one of the most sensational releases from the first batch, which were photos from the Apollo 12 mission on the Moon in 1969.

One of the photos have five "unidentified phenomena," but Loeb said federal authorities have now officially concluded that those blue flashes are most likely cosmic rays.

A picture of unidentified phenomena on the moon during the 1969 Apollo 12 mission. (NASA)

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Until 2020, Loeb headed up Harvard University's astronomy department, where he studied black holes, the formation of the universe's first stars and extraterrestrial life.

In 2017, when scientists discovered a remnant of a Pluto-like world in the Solar System, Loeb disputed those findings, arguing that the object was possibly a light sail from an alien civilization.

After this claim earned him widespread respect in the UFO community, Loeb founded the Galileo Project at Harvard to search for artifacts from extraterrestrial civilizations.