Podcasts · Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Is the White House's New UAP Council a Game Changer for Disclosure?

17 Jun 2026 · 2 h 16 min

Recently, Professor Avi Loeb was tasked by the White House, AARO, ODNI, and the FBI with assembling and leading a new UAP Science Advisory Council — comprising astrophysicists, AI experts, and psychologists — to advise the intelligence community on unidentified anomalous phenomena. It was announced the same week the government released its third batch of declassified UAP files. Now he joins us live to talk about what that actually means — and what it doesn't.

This is not a "the aliens are here" stream. It's the harder conversation. I study the cosmic microwave background, and when we find an anomaly, we exhaust every instrument artifact and foreground before anyone whispers "new physics." I want to know why UAP science should run on a different evidentiary standard — and Loeb is exactly the right person to push on it, because he's already attributing much of the released footage to cosmic rays, balloons, and possibly Chinese drones, while holding the door open for the small fraction that stays unexplained.

WHAT WE GET INTO:

- The council, its mandate, and the question nobody's asking: does "advisory" mean anyone has to listen?

- The orbs — Chinese surveillance drones, classified US tech, or something else — and the prior you'd need before you say "non-human"

- Whether "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" gets applied selectively

- AI in the Galileo Project's detection pipeline, and the false-positive problem: what's the training comparison class for "non-human technology"?

- The critique that a council built to study the object ignores where the data actually comes from — human witnesses

GUEST:

Professor Avi Loeb — Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard, former chair of the Astronomy department, head of the Galileo Project, author of "Extraterrestrial" and "Interstellar."

Avi on X: https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb

Avi's Medium: https://avi-loeb.medium.com

Galileo Project: https://galileoproject.org

HOST:

Brian Keating — experimental cosmologist, UC San Diego.

Brian on X: https://x.com/briankeating

Brian's Medium: https://drbriankeating.medium.com/

Loeb's essay "Keeping Our Eyes on the Orbs, Not the Audience": https://avi-loeb.medium.com

CHAPTERS:

00:00 — "Chinese drones, or the biggest discovery in history?"

00:10 — Avi Loeb, live

00:40 — The White House just put him in charge of UAPs

10:00 — Legitimacy, or a gilded cage?

13:00 — The orbs: Chinese drones or something else?

24:00 — The prior: what's your base rate for "non-human"?

28:00 — The CMB standard: how a cosmologist kills an anomaly

33:00 — AI, SETI, and the false-positive problem

44:00 — Two cosmologists, one Nobel, one council

47:00 — Lightning round

50:00 — The Impossible Question

#uap #AviLoeb #UFO #Astrophysics #GalileoProject #SETI #IntoTheImpossible

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