Harvard professor Avi Loeb on heading the new council studying UFOs

We are back to our journey of trying to get to the bottom of the UAP mystery and up until now, one thing this mystery has been lacking is a lot of hard science. Yeah, we're seeing more videos, there are more reports, more sightings declassified, but what's been missing is really hard scientific analysis, which hopefully is where the new UAP Science Advisory Council will come in to help the White House and Pentagon, the FBI and other intelligence agencies to try to figure out what has been darting through our skies and the top scientists heading it up is somebody that you are probably very familiar with because he's on our show all the time, Harvard professor, astrophysicist Avi Loeb. And joining us now is the man himself, a doctor. Thank you so much for being with us. In the last month and a half, we have seen, I don't know, I wouldn't call it a disclosure month and a half, but we have seen a hundred videos released by the government or about a hundred. Do any of them really stand out as definitive proof of something that might be more advanced than humans, maybe some alien technology to you? Well, thanks for having me. On June 12th, Steven Spielberg released his movie Disclosure Day and we had a disclosure day that day. And the most interesting document there was a report from the director of the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office in the Pentagon, Dr. John Kozlowski, saying that there was an event lasting for two days in October 2023, where 40% of the reported phenomena associated with objects in the sky cannot be explained as human made technologies that we know about here in the United States and abroad in adversarial nations. So that is very revealing because how often do you have a government official declaring publicly that they are not doing their job? They cannot figure out what these objects are. And on the same week, I was asked to actually chair, to establish a council that studies the science of UAP and advise the White House, the office that Dr. Kozlowski is leading in the Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, in trying to figure out the nature of these unidentified anomalous phenomena. And I see that as a very important step forward because the government is asking scientists to get engaged. And it seems like you all have assembled the Avengers of all kinds of UAP analysis here, anthropology, molecular biology. You've got, you know, it looks like psychologists here, people that are experts in material science. Do you think that you will all have full access to whatever material might exist out there? We certainly hope so, because in the most down-to-earth interpretation of these objects that are not figured out, these are technologies that are human-made from adversarial nations, and we have to figure them out because currently there seem to be holes in the defense of the United States. We see them around strategic assets. And therefore, the Pentagon needs to invest more in researching these objects. And, you know, it's all about data and evidence, and that will guide us to nature of these objects. But even if one object, just one, is not human-made, that would be the biggest discovery ever made by humanity. So that's why it's so appealing to scientists like myself. But if we end up concluding that all the objects are human-made, I would still feel that my time was well spent in helping the Pentagon fulfill their mission. As a citizen of the United States, that's my civil duty, to serve the government and help it in its mission. Applying science to all of this is what's been desperately needed for decades here. And yet we live in a day and age where there is a lot of talk of biologics and alien remains, recovered craft. Have you seen any hard evidence of that? I haven't seen. Steven Spielberg seems to believe it, because in his script, there is a description of that. However, that's artistic freedom, as far as I can tell. And if such material exists, of course, I would love to see it and learn from it. But there is also a possibility that, you know, in the crash sites of human-made objects, there were pilots that were retrieved and they were given some code names. And then when people saw these documents, they assumed that we have captured the aliens. But actually, Nordics are real people. And one of them is collaborating with me, Stein Jacobson, a professor in geochemistry. We analyzed materials from the crash site of an interstellar meteor. And I tried to tell him that I'm protecting his heritage, which he associates with, you know, the Vikings, not with extraterrestrials. Well, Vikings could be from a different star system. We'll wait and see what the scientific analysis bears out here. But, you know, doctor, the thing that I've been trying to figure out, and I know you are too, is whether there's a conspiracy of a cover-up of something tangible that the government knows a lot more about, or whether there has been a cover-up of what the government doesn't know, a cover-up of ignorance, if you will. How do you scientifically investigate that kind of conspiracy? Well, my impression is that the better explanation is that the government is incompetent on occasion. And they basically see things they don't fully understand, and they're not trying maliciously to hide it. They would prefer to put it under wraps so that they don't get scrutinized for not doing their job. You know, by Congress, the defense budget is nearly a trillion dollars in 2026, and yet they cannot figure out objects in the sky. And so, in addition, some of the data was obtained from classified sensors. So I can understand why it would be classified and hidden from view. We don't want adversarial nations to be aware of the vulnerability of the defense system of the U.S. Because if these orbs that were reported about are actually drones produced by an adversarial nation, then, you know, the fact that we can't identify them will encourage those nations to put even more of them. So these may be reasons for why the government kept it under wraps. But now there is a completely new mindset where, following President Trump's directive, there is willingness to share or declassify some of the data and, moreover, to engage with scientists. And I look forward to that collaboration. I don't think, you know, anyone wanted to put the Pope in jail when, in 1992, the Vatican admitted that Galileo Galilei was right, and they were wrong. So organizations are often wrong, and they sometimes hide things from the public, as the Vatican did, by putting Galileo in house arrest. But the point of the matter is that we should focus on a brighter future, on the implications from realizing that we are not alone, that we have some visitors, if they exist, rather than on trying to punish bureaucrats that had hidden some of the information from us in the past. Yeah. First things first, come clean on whatever it is, whether it's ignorance or something else. Professor, really appreciate you heading all this up. Thank you so very much for being with us. We thank you for watching, and remember, stay updated on breaking news and top stories on the NBC News app, or watch live on our YouTube channel.