The White House put a Harvard astronomer in charge of its new UFO panel, and I have questions

[David74]

Buried in this week's news, the White House appointed former Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb to lead its new panel on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, the official term for what everyone still calls UFOs. Loeb is a serious scientist and also the field's most famous optimist, the man who suggested the interstellar object Oumuamua deserved consideration as possible alien technology

That combination is exactly what makes this interesting. Appoint a debunker and believers dismiss the panel before it starts, appoint a true believer and the scientists walk away, Loeb is the rare figure with credentials in both camps and critics in both camps too

My own position is the boring one, the interesting question was never little green men, it is why official reporting channels produced so much unexplained data for decades and whether the explanations are mundane, foreign, or genuinely unknown. A panel that just gets the boring taxonomy right would be a public service

So, temperature check. Is putting an enthusiast in charge how you finally get institutional honesty on this, or how you get a panel that finds what its chairman already believes? And what finding would actually change YOUR mind in either direction?

[Owen84]

Enthusiast in charge is fine as long as the methods are boring. The problem with this field was never curiosity, it was curiosity without instrumentation

[Always_David72]

Loeb runs an actual telescope project hunting for this stuff with published methodology, which puts him one full universe ahead of every previous panel chair. Cautiously in favour

[Jess_43]

The cynical read is that a panel is where questions go to be managed rather than answered. The chair barely matters if the classified data never reaches him

[WarningPoint49]

That is the whole ballgame honestly. The interesting sightings are military sensor data and no astronomer gets that clearance treatment without strings

[MayanHan]

What would change my mind is simple, one artefact, one material sample, one photo that survives analysis. Eighty years of blurry footage has a base rate and it is not encouraging

[Ellie_28]

Flip side, what would change a skeptic's mind is stated, what would change a believer's mind is never stated, and that asymmetry tells you which one is doing science

[ReasoningCore40]

Gentle pushback, plenty of the serious UAP crowd say exactly what would falsify their position, better sensors finding mundane explanations. Some of them even fund the sensors

[Undertaker]

The Oumuamua thing gets misremembered constantly, he said consider the hypothesis, not believe it. There is a difference and it is the entire scientific method

[Hannah56]

Honestly just glad the topic moved from tabloids to telescopes in my lifetime, whatever the answer turns out to be

[DeepInlet]

Prediction, two years, one careful report, findings of insufficient data, and both camps declare victory. Bookmark this post