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A month and a half ago, I was visited by a representative from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). He raised a simple question: “Would you be willing to establish and lead a new advisory council for the U.S. Government on the science of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). I responded: “You had me at `hello.’
The request is unusual for several reasons. First, how often do government employees admit that they cannot fulfill their duties and ask scientists for help? Second, why would ODNI admit that the best sensors employed by the U.S. military are unable to identify objects in our sky if the most down-to-Earth interpretation is that such objects might be manufactured by adversarial nations. We know about the Chinese spy balloon that was shot down in 2023. When finding an ant in the kitchen, we get alarmed because we realize that there must be many more ants hiding elsewhere. For every spy balloon that we know about there must be many drones that were flagged as UAP orbs.
There was no doubt in mind that I should accept this role. As a U.S. citizen, I feel obligated to help ODNI and the Pentagon fulfil their mission of protecting national security. Moreover, if one in a million UAP happens to have a non-human origin, this will constitute the biggest cosmic discovery ever made by humanity.
Yes, the U.S. government is capable of making a cosmic discovery. While astronomers train their telescope on a small portion of the sky at any given time and ignore objects that fly overhead, the U.S. government monitors the entire sky with a focus on “low-hanging fruits” to protect national security. In addition, the government invests much more money in developing state-of-the-art sensors that are more advanced than those used for astronomical observations.
For example, in the early 1960s the U.S. Air Force and the Advanced Research Projects Agency developed the Vela satellite program to verify compliance of the Soviet Union with the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, underwater, and in space. The U.S. needed a way to catch the Soviet Union cheating through the detonation of nuclear warheads in space where ground-based seismic and acoustic detectors could not pick them up. Each Vela satellite included gamma-ray sensors designed to detect the radiation flash of a nuclear explosion. The satellites were launched in pairs to about a third of the distance to the Moon, and positioned so that each pair could triangulate the location of any detected event by comparing arrival times between the two satellites. On July 2, 1967, the Vela 4 satellite pair detected a burst of gamma radiation that looked nothing like a nuclear explosion. It was too bright, too short, and had the wrong spectral shape as no nuclear weapon produces gamma rays with these characteristics. Subsequently, Los Alamos scientists found sixteen similar events in the archived Vela data. They published their findings in a 1973 paper, announcing the discovery of new astronomical sources. The delay between 1967 and 1973 was partly due to the classified nature of the Vela program as the data could not be published until the relevant records were declassified. A quarter of a century later, astronomers realized that long-duration gamma-ray bursts originate from the collapse of a massive star to a black hole at cosmological distances. As material spirals towards the black hole, it launches two opposing jets near the speed of light. Each jet drills a hole in the envelope of the stellar progenitor and emits a flash of gamma-rays that can be seen by an observer who is aligned with its direction. In retrospect, the Vela satellites discovered the birth of black holes at the edge of the Universe while seeking the signatures of Soviet atomic detonations near Earth.
In support of President Trump’s directive on UAP transparency, I was tasked by ODNI, the White House, the Pentagon’s All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the FBI and the Intelligence Community, to establish and lead the new UAP Science Advisory Council. The council reports to the UAP Governing Board which includes representatives from the above-mentioned organizations. Its goal is to advise the U.S. government on how to resolve the nature of UAP.
The council already submitted a request for more than 50 items of information concerning past incidents and possible related materials. The council’s scientific analysis and findings will be shared publicly on the website https://uapsac.com/
The size of the council was chosen not to be too small — so as to lack sufficient expertise, nor too big — to trigger regression to the mean. For its members, I chose brilliant scientists with expertise in physics, oceanography, data analysis, statistics and psychology, who are all open minded to go wherever the evidence guides us. I also included a skeptic to make sure that there are no biases in the analysis and to make sure that the conclusions reached are beyond any doubt.
We must keep our eyes on the orbs and not on social media. We should not be tempted to jump into premature conclusions unless the evidence is beyond a reasonable doubt.
Historical records and new observations are not competing priorities. Past government records may contain scientifically valuable data that has never been available to independent scientists. The council can pursue those records while also encouraging new evidence that meets modern scientific standards.
The council will process only unclassified information. This is intentional as it allows scientific analysis, methods, and conclusions to be shared publicly. Classified access goes through the UAP Governing Board and relevant agencies, which the council advises.
The council is not starting with a conclusion. Unknown does not mean extraterrestrial, but it also should not be explained away without evidence. The task is to reduce uncertainty by improving the quality of the data.
The nature of UAP is a detective story and we should resolve it by collecting new clues that were not recognized before. I will do my best to overcome the anti-science sentiments expressed too often by believers and skeptics. The future can be better than the past. History does not have to repeat itself.
The best is yet to come. Stay tuned!
