They Gave Him the Title. He Didn't Get the Files: Loeb Gets...nada?
The White House, AARO, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence needed a credible scientist to chair their new UAP Science Advisory Council. They found one: Avi Loeb, Harvard professor, prolific author, and arguably the most recognizable establishment name willing to put his reputation on this problem without flinching. They gave him the council.
They did not give him anything to advise on.
According to Loeb himself, the council has "no clearance and no authority whatsoever." Instead of raw sensor data, classified footage, or witness debrief transcripts, they receive — and this is the actual phrase — artistic reconstructions. The government's appointed UAP scientists are reviewing interpretive art. This is roughly like hiring a cardiologist to consult on a patient's file and then handing him a crayon drawing of a heart.
Loeb has not quietly accepted this arrangement. He published a piece this week titled "Reality Should Not Be Classified," arguing that the government's classification regime is fundamentally incompatible with doing real science on UAP. He is correct. You cannot peer-review a security clearance. You cannot replicate findings that don't exist on paper.
Loeb is at the very least, a 'polarizing" figure — if you've followed this space, you know. He moved oceans — literally, with a trawling expedition — searching for fragments of an interstellar object he believed might be artificial. He gets mocked, frequently, by some of the same people who have now made him the public face of government UAP science outreach. The appointment did not silence the skeptics. It just gave everyone more to argue about.
The cynical read is that the Science Advisory Council is what governance boards usually are: a credibility vehicle that protects the institution more than it informs the public. Bring in a Harvard name, seat him on a committee, let him give press conferences. Everyone wins except the people who want answers.
Loeb is speaking at the Disclosure Forum in Washington, D.C. on June 25. It should be interesting to hear a scientist describe, in public, the experience of being appointed to investigate something he is not permitted to investigate. The phrase he used is the one worth keeping: reality should not be classified. Simple, accurate, and given everything that has come out of three rounds of Pentagon releases, it's increasingly hard to argue with.