Harvard astronomer tapped to lead White House UFO council says US government 'baffled by what they are seeing'

Avi Loeb saying the government is "baffled" is either the most interesting sentence in Washington this month or the most predictable one, depending on how many decades you've spent watching this dance. Pentagon says it doesn't know what it's looking at, forms a council, promises transparency, requests documents. We've seen this movie before. The difference this time is Loeb himself, a Harvard astronomer with actual name recognition, which means the usual dodge of "just some crank chasing lights in the sky" doesn't quite work.

Fifty-plus videos and documents is not nothing. It's also not a lot, given how long the Pentagon has been sitting on this material and how many separate offices have touched it over the years. If this council actually gets the footage, actually gets briefed honestly, and actually reports back to the public instead of a closed hearing room, that would be a genuine first. Every previous round of "disclosure" has ended with vague verbal testimony and grainy clips nobody can enhance.

What we'd ask is simple: does this council have subpoena teeth or just a nice title and a mailing list? Congress has passed language demanding UAP records be turned over before, and agencies have found ways to slow-walk it anyway. An astronomer's credibility doesn't override bureaucratic habit. If Loeb comes back in six months still waiting on half his requests, that tells the real story better than any press release will.

There's also the political angle nobody's saying out loud. A White House genuinely willing to declassify this stuff would be doing something rare: trusting Americans with information instead of managing them. We'll believe the transparency push when the documents actually land in public hands, not before.