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.

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.