A month ago, I was visited by a representative from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). He raised a simple question.

“Would you be willing to establish and lead a new advisory council for the US Government on the science of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena?” In other words, would I head a council on UFOs. I responded: “You had me at ‘hello.’”

There was no doubt in my mind that I should accept this role. Our goal is to advise the U.S. government on how to resolve the nature of UAP. 

The identification of UAP is crucial to the protection of national security. As a US citizen, I feel obligated to help the ODNI and the Pentagon in this mission. Moreover, if one in a million UAP happens to have a non-human origin, this will constitute the biggest cosmic discovery ever made by humanity.

The request from ODNI was unusual for several reasons. First, how often do government employees admit they cannot fulfill their duties and ask scientists for help? Second, implicit in the request was the admission that the US military’s best sensors are currently unable to identify adequately flying objects. The most plausible explanation for these mysteries is that they are manufactured by adversarial nations. That makes them a security threat. Why can’t we identify them?

We know about the Chinese spy balloon that was shot down in 2023. When you find an ant in the kitchen, you become alarmed because you realize many more ants must be crawling nearby. For every one spy balloon we know about, there must be many objects that were flagged as UAP orbs.

The government is constantly monitoring the entire sky. It struggles to interpret all the signals picked up by its many advanced sensors. But history tells us that these sensors contain invaluable information. That’s where scientists come in.

For example, in the early 1960s the Air Force and the Advanced Research Projects Agency developed the Vela satellite program. Its purpose was to verify Soviet compliance with the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear-weapons tests in the atmosphere, underwater, and in space. To catch the Soviet Union cheating, the satellites were equipped with gamma-ray sensors designed to detect the radiation flash of a nuclear explosion.

On July 2, 1967, the Vela 4 satellite pair detected a burst of gamma radiation that looked nothing like a nuclear explosion. It was too bright, too short, and had the wrong spectral shape. Subsequently, Los Alamos scientists found 16 similar events in the archived Vela data. Researchers puzzled over the findings for decades. Some wondered if the radiation came from alien sources, or a dangerous new Soviet technology.

A quarter of a century later, astronomers realized that long-duration gamma-ray bursts originated from the collapse of a massive star to a black hole. As material spirals toward the black hole, it launches two opposing jets near the speed of light. Each jet drills a hole in the collapsing star and emits a flash of gamma rays. We realized that these were the enigmatic bursts the Vela satellites were detecting. In other words, the Vela satellites discovered the birth of black holes at the edge of the universe while looking for Soviet detonations near Earth.

Our council hopes to make many more such discoveries that will improve national security and our understanding of the cosmos. The team has already submitted a request for more than 50 items of information concerning past UAP incidents and possible related materials. Our scientific analysis and findings will be shared publicly on the website uapsac.com.

I chose the size and makeup of the council carefully. It is not so small as to lack sufficient expertise nor too big as to trigger regression to the mean. I selected brilliant scientists with expertise in physics, oceanography, data analysis, statistics, and psychology. All are open-minded enough to go wherever the evidence guides us. I also included a skeptic of alien technologies to ensure there are no biases in the analysis and to make sure our conclusions are beyond doubt.

The council is not starting with any conclusion in mind. The “Unknown” part of UAP does not necessarily mean extraterrestrial. But we cannot discount the possibility that it might, and we should not explain away such possibilities without evidence.

The nature of UAP is a detective story. We will solve it by collecting new clues and reexamining old ones in new ways. I will do my best to overcome the anti-science sentiments expressed too often by believers and skeptics alike. The best is yet to come!