Representative Anna Paulina Luna travelled to Cambridge, Massachusetts on 17 April 2026 and walked into the Harvard College Observatory to meet Avi Loeb. Loeb documented the visit in a Medium post the same week. The meeting did not generate a press release, did not produce a hearing transcript, and did not appear on the Oversight Committee’s standing weekly schedule. It is, even so, a structurally important event. It opened a direct working line between the chair of the House Oversight Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, the member who is publicly leading the push for the Pentagon’s 46 disputed UAP videos, and the senior academic voice arguing that any release should pass through scientific peer review before it can carry evidentiary weight.
The visit is best read against three other dates on the timeline. Luna’s letter to Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth on 31 March demanded delivery of 46 specific UAP video files by 14 April. The deadline lapsed. President Donald Trump’s 19 February directive to the Secretary of War and other agencies to begin the release of UAP-related records remains the operative authorising instrument. The 17 March CISA registration of the alien.gov and aliens.gov domains is the public infrastructure footprint of that directive. Luna’s 17 April visit to Loeb sits in the middle of all that.
What the Galileo Project Brings
Loeb co-founded the Galileo Project at Harvard in 2021. The programme operates instrumented observatories at the Harvard College Observatory and is in the process of expanding to additional sites. The Project’s commissioning paper, currently in peer review under the Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation, reports on roughly half a million tracked aerial objects, of which under three per cent display anomalies that resist immediate explanation. The methodology is calibrated, instrumented, and published. It is the closest thing the broader UAP field has to a scientific reference.
Loeb has consistently argued, on his blog, in talks, and in his book ‘Interstellar’, that the public posture toward UAP releases should be calibrated by the same evidentiary standards. Footage without chain of custody, calibration data, and parallel-instrument cross-check carries no scientific weight. Footage with those things attached can carry meaningful weight. The argument is not novel. It is the standard scientific posture toward any anomalous observation. What is novel is Loeb’s willingness to apply it publicly to UAP material, and his willingness to engage with the political process around the disclosure programme rather than holding the field at arm’s length.
What the Visit Means For the Release Pipeline
Loeb’s late-April Medium piece, The White House Will Release UAP Videos, But Will They Be the Most Intriguing Ones?, articulates the editorial risk that drives the Galileo Project’s posture. The selection bias inside an interagency declassification pipeline runs against anomalous material. Footage that resolves cleanly to a known object, a calibration artefact, or a routine observation will clear declassification first. Footage that resists explanation, by definition, raises the perceived risk of release for the agency holding it. The piece does not accuse any agency of bad faith. It identifies a structural feature of any classified release programme.
Luna’s visit positions the Task Force to either accept or push back on that selection bias when material starts to land. The Galileo Project provides the technical reference standard against which any released video can be evaluated. If Luna chooses to use that standard, any release that contains predominantly explained material can be characterised as a partial release. If she chooses not to, the release will carry whatever editorial weight the press cycle assigns it.
The Open Question Around Aliens.gov
The aliens.gov and alien.gov domains were registered by CISA on 17 March 2026 and remain inactive as of 29 April. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has stated that AARO is co-ordinating with the White House on consolidation of UAP records. The Pentagon missed the 14 April deadline for the 46 video files. No content has appeared on either domain. The portal is the technical substrate for the release programme. Without it, the release runs through traditional FOIA-style document drops, agency websites, and selective press distribution. With it, the Task Force has a single named target on which to anchor any framing about completeness or selection bias.
Luna’s working line to Loeb is the editorial counterweight to that pipeline. The visit, on its own, does not change anything procedural. It changes the framing space. The reading public, whenever a release lands, will now have a Harvard astrophysicist on a working line into the Oversight Task Force chair, available to characterise the scientific weight of whatever material has been released. That is, in practical terms, a peer-review function attached to the disclosure pipeline.
What Comes Next
The decision is the White House’s. The pipeline is the agencies’. The release is whatever they say it is. The framing is now at least partly Luna’s and Loeb’s, jointly. The next public statement from either of them, particularly any joint statement on the contents of an aliens.gov launch, will set the editorial frame for the rest of the disclosure programme. Worth watching whenever it happens.