Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb spent the week of 20 April 2026 making a simple request of the Trump administration: if the White House is going to release classified Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena files, give scientists the raw data.
In a Medium column published on 20 April, titled ‘The White House Will Release UAP Videos, But Will They Be the Most Intriguing Ones?’, Loeb argued that the most scientifically significant UAP material is likely to stay classified, and that any material that does surface will only be useful if it reaches researchers in original form rather than as processed broadcast clips. He reinforced the same point on Newsmax and FOX 10 Phoenix the same week, and on NewsNation’s ‘Truth of the Matter’ podcast with host Natasha Zouves.
Loeb, who directs Harvard’s Galileo Project, was clear that he holds no clearance and has no personal access to the 46 UAP videos Representative Anna Paulina Luna demanded from the Department of War on 31 March. His point, instead, was methodological: video stripped of sensor metadata, timestamping, and original resolution is not evidence, it is imagery. Scientists can analyse the first. They cannot do much with the second.
Why Loeb is pushing now
The timing is not accidental.
President Trump told a Phoenix rally on 18 April that “very interesting” UAP documents would be released “very, very soon”. The Department of War missed Luna’s 14 April deadline for the 46 videos. AARO told reporters on 12 April that it was “working in close coordination with the White House and across federal agencies to facilitate the expeditious release of never-before-seen UAP information”. Loeb’s intervention arrives exactly at the moment when the government is deciding what the public release will actually look like.
His concern is that a curated Pentagon release, filtered for national security, compressed for broadcast, and interpreted in advance by AARO, will close the scientific window before it opens. If that happens, the most important question, whether any of these objects are anomalous in a way current physics cannot account for, becomes unanswerable from the outside.
The 3I/ATLAS throughline
Loeb tied the UAP disclosure debate to the passage of 3I/ATLAS, the interstellar object that moved through the inner solar system in late 2025 and early 2026. He has argued publicly, and at times controversially, that a small fraction of objects in our skies could be artificial, and that separating the natural from the anomalous requires the same telescopic rigour applied to interstellar visitors.
He also noted a rise in fireball reports during the 3I/ATLAS period. He did not claim a causal link. He did say the correlation deserves investigation rather than dismissal.
What the Galileo Project wants
The Galileo Project, launched at Harvard in 2021, operates ground-based observatories in Colorado and a growing network of partner sites, with calibrated cameras, infrared sensors and radio receivers designed for full-spectrum, open-data monitoring of the sky. Its central argument is that the scientific community has never had a dedicated, transparent, publishable dataset on aerial anomalies to work from.
Loeb’s ask to the Trump administration maps onto that argument. Release original sensor files. Release metadata. Release calibration information. Let outside researchers reproduce the analysis. If the material is genuinely anomalous, science will say so. If it is mundane, science will say that too. Either outcome is preferable to a curated press release.
The policy question
There is a straightforward question the Trump administration has not yet answered: when AARO, the Department of War and the White House decide which UAP material to release, who checks their work?
No formal mechanism currently exists for independent scientific verification of US government UAP disclosures. The Villarroel-Vasco 2025 peer-reviewed papers on historical sky surveys, the Galileo Project’s instrumentation, and the arXiv survey ‘The New Science of Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena’ published in February 2025 all represent attempts to build that mechanism from outside government. None of them have been given access to classified material.
Loeb’s request this week is not, in the end, about specific videos. It is about which community gets to interpret the evidence. If the answer is only the agencies that produced it, disclosure becomes a public relations exercise. If the answer includes peer-reviewed science, disclosure becomes a research programme.
That is the distinction the White House will have to make, and make soon.