The White House Will Release UAP Videos, But Will They Be the Most Intriguing Ones?
In a recent meeting of the Galileo Project research team, my brilliant postdoc, Regina Sarmiento, presented a new triangulation analysis that indicated weird zig-zag motion of an object at a distance of 5.6 kilometers. Regina dismissed this motion as unreal and moved on to discuss other objects, but I chose to stop her and said to the entire team: “when we notice a weird behavior, we should be intrigued to study it further, not to dismiss it, because the goal of the Galileo Project is to search for technological objects near Earth that were not human-made and might therefore behave weirdly.” The Galileo team immediately drilled deeper and found that the zig-zag motion represented malfunction of the triangulation software during periods where data from the cameras was absent. Regina was correct in her intuitive guess but we had to verify that she was right.
Science is based on the meticulous analysis of instrument data that is openly available to scrutiny. Following President Trump’s directive in February 19, 2026 (posted here), congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna submitted a letter (accessible here) to the Secretary of War on behalf of the congressional Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, requesting the delivery of 46 specific videos of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) by April 14, 2026. After the deadline has passed without UAP data delivery, Luna tweeted here: “No one from the Pentagon had responded until we reached out, and it appears that someone did not pass the letter to the appropriate authorities. How convenient. Nonetheless, we will be getting the requested list. We are not waiting for a briefing at some unspecified future date.” It was subsequently confirmed by a War Department official (as reported here) that the White House is coordinating with the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in the Pentagon and other federal agencies the release of new UAP data that was never publicly released before.
The fundamental question is how scientifically intriguing will the released data be, and will it include the most tantalizing evidence in possession of the U.S. government. Most likely, the best data was collected recently by classified state-of-the-art sensors and therefore cannot be released for national security reasons.
Personally, I have no access to classified UAP videos but my hope is that the disclosed material will be in the form of original data with no degradation or post-processing, so that scientists like myself can dig into it and help the government figure out whether they have mundane or exciting interpretations. Any data from satellite imaging would be particularly interesting because it avoids ambiguities about the motion and distance of the camera relative to the objects of interest. When anomalies are documented by trustworthy intelligence officers and military personnel, mainstream scientists should be curious to investigate what these anomalies mean.
Determining the nature of UAP is important for national security as it may indicate advanced technologies developed by adversarial nations. Even if the interpretation turns out to be mundane, studying the evidence is never a waste of time. It strengthens the ability of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to protect our nation.
If in addition to videos, materials were recovered from alleged crash sites of UAP, it would be straightforward to test whether they originated beyond the solar system. Even a gram of material is sufficient for isotope analysis using a mass spectrometer. All materials in our solar system formed from the same gas cloud. Materials from another star would likely exhibit different isotopic fingerprints. Scientists like myself can help the White House and Congress determine the nature of the UAP.
Disclosure does not necessarily infringe on national security. Decades-old information is unlikely to be relevant to today’s battlefield technologies since human-made systems have advanced dramatically since then. Data on UAP outside the performance envelope of human-made technologies should be scrutinized for mundane interpretations like malfunction of the sensors or the analysis software. Detection by multiple sensors that are separated from each other would allow triangulation and verification.
We must know whether we have a cosmic neighbor. Finding evidence for it would transform our current perception of the Universe as a cold and lonely expanse of matter and radiation which follow the laws of physics deterministically. Finding technology or science beyond our own would present us with an opportunity to learn and advance.
We are living in exciting times when space exploration was recently rejuvenated by the success of the Artemis II mission and artificial intelligence (AI) is about to exceed human intelligence. But discovering alien intelligence would have far greater consequences to our future than either of these two. Alien intelligence is superior to AI in that its training data sets exceeds what is accessible on Earth.
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Before my morning jog at sunrise, I received the following inspiring message from the poet Alan Wagstaff in New Zealand:
“Dear Dr Loeb
The poem, ‘Dumbfounded’ began while singing ‘When the Ship Comes In’ *, the prophetic ballad written by Bob Dylan in 1963 [a year after you were born]. In that song, “the ship” arrives as a symbol of moral reckoning and historical reversal. As I sang the image shifted in my imagination. The vessel that approached was no longer maritime — but interstellar.
‘Dumbfounded’ explores what might happen if an apparently inert astronomical object — something first dismissed as a comet or asteroid — revealed itself to be an extraterrestrial craft. This is an imaginative reflection on your oft-stated scientific inquiry. The third stanza acknowledges your influence.
The final stanza turns inward, suggesting that observation itself is never neutral.
In that sense, the poem is not only about first contact; it is about the difficulty of recognizing it when it arrives.
To see my poem on YouTube, click on the link:
Kind regards
Alan
Alan Wagstaff
New Zealand
When the Ship Comes In
Oh a time will come up when the winds will stop
and the breeze will cease to be a -breathin’.
Like the stillness in the wind before the hurricane begins,
hour that the ship comes in.
And the sea will split and the ships will hit.
And the sands on the shoreline will be shaking.
And the tide will sound and the waves will pound,
and the morning will be breaking.
Oh the fishes will laugh as they swim out of the path
And the seagulls they’ll be a-smilin’
And the rocks on the sand will proudly stand
The hour that the ship comes in
And the words that are used for to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they’re spoken
Oh the chains of the sea will have busted in the night
And be buried on the bottom of the ocean.
A song will lift as the main sail shifts
And the boat drifts unto the shoreline
And the sun will respect every face on the deck
The hour that the ship comes in
And the sands will roll out a carpet of gold
For your wearied toes to be a-touchin’
And the ship’s wise men will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin’.
Oh the foe will arise with the sleep still in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And they’ll know that it’s for real,
The hour that the ship comes in
And they’ll raise their hands
Sayin’ we’ll meet all you demands
But we’ll shout from the bow
Your days are numbered
And like Pharoah’s tribe they’ll be drowned in the tide
And like Goliath they’ll be conquered
Bob Dylan 1963”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (2005–2026), and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
Professional website:
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/
Social media:
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb
https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb
