NYT Takes a Look at the White House UAP Council

The New York Times recently posted an article taking a deeper look into the White House's UAP Advisory Council along with some of their results. Composed of a veritable who's-who of cross-domain experts, the council's goal is to focus on data-driven science using the "same rigor" of any scientific endeavor.

Oddly, the article didn't reveal much other than what had been reported earlier in the last couple of months regarding the latest UAP data releases along with skeptical comments and some competing organizational in-fighting. The NYT quoted that the current results were "low-hanging fruit." 

Regardless, here's the makeup of the panel (led by Avi Loeb):

• Liberty Capito - professor of Data Science 
• Carol Cleland - professor of Philosophy
• Richard Cloete - Computer scientist at Harvard University
• Omer Eldadi - Psychologist a
• Tim Gallaudet -retired Navy admiral
• Robin Hanson - professor of Economics
• Ross Howard - producer of the Event Horizon podcast 
• Kevin Knuth - professor of Physics
• Ravi Kopparapu - NASA Goddard Space Flight Center expert 
• Ben Lamm - CEO Of Colossal Biosciences
• Jacob Haqq Misra- Meteorology and Astrobiology specialist
• Devesh Nandal - postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics
• Garry Nolan - professor of Pathology
• Michael Shermer -publisher of Skeptic magazine
• Peter Skafish - Anthropologist
• Matthew Szydagis - professor of Physics 
• Jennice Vilhauer - clinical Psychologist

As I've always noted while following this phenomena for over 50 years now, if UAP technologies are in the hands of governments, there is no way they are going to reveal anything substantial to the public. Why would they? It would, of course, provide significant technological advantages that you wouldn't want other governments to know about. But at least there is an attempt to move public opinion from wild speculation to something more at a Level 2 approach. Time will tell.

I think Michal Shermer said it best in the article - "many sightings are 'stuck in this kind of low-information zone' where 'you can’t quite make out what’s going on.'" 

New White House UAP Council

Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer who has publicly pushed the envelope on extraterrestrial life has been approached by the Trump White House to run a new UAP council that will study and advise on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.

Loeb has served in government functions before such as Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The council will be made up of a number of other Harvard staff, some astrobiologists and some miscellaneous members. The intention is to coordinate UAP investigations and help with the “timely coordination of declassification of UAP-related information.” It will be interesting to see if much can come of this!!

SKA Could Detect Earth's Cell Phone Network within 5 Lightyears

As the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope arrays continue to build out in Australia and South Africa, the potential resolution of this massive radio astronomy project is enormous - enhancing the possibility of discovering extraterrestrial signals. Some current estimates propose that leakage radiation from something like Earth’s cellphone network could be detected within a radius of 5 light years.

You can see the SKA overall projected sensitivity (min detectable reference signal at 100 light years) in the graph below (solid green line - Trenblay et al., 2026).

Read more here: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence with the SKA

Ability of world-wide radio telescopes to detect transmissions by frequency

SETI Institute Kickstarter for Scanning the Sky

What if we could create a network of independent sky scanning systems that could coordinate the observations of anomalous astronomical events that might hint at extraterrestrial activity? As they note - “A potential discovery must be carefully authenticated by independent organizations and different instruments before it is announced as credible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.”

Well, it seems the SETI institute has partnered with SkyMapper - a Kickstarter funded device that links to a global network of independent, separated instruments - each running on a rooftop anywhere in the world. 

You can find out more here: https://www.seti.org/news/disclosure-needs-data/

Extraterrestrial Life on Tidally Locked Planets

Can small, red dwarf stars (M class) really support extraterrestrial habitability? Red dwarf stars are much cooler (~10% brightness) and smaller (10 to 50%) than our Sun. This pushes the habitable zone for planets much closer to the parent star of the system which, in turn, causes planets to become tidally locked (one hemisphere always facing the star like the Moon is to Earth). Also, being closer the planets are more exposed to infrared and flaring radiation. Yet, they have incredible lifespans in trillions of years (vs. the Sun’s 10B year lifespan) and comprise about 75% of all stars in the galaxy.

Gale & Wandell (2017) argue that perhaps tidally locked planets orbiting red dwarfs may develop life in zones of “continuous illumination with a considerable component of photosynthetic 400-700 nm radiation. This is analogous to the lush summer growth of vegetation on Earth, at very high latitude.” You can read the paper here: The Potential of Planets Orbiting Red Dwarf Stars to Support Oxygenic Photosynthesis and Complex Life

With the large number of red dwarfs, maybe we’ll discover biotic markers in future missions!

Does a Civilization have a Limit to Growth?

Growth of a planetary population, technology, productivity and energy consumption seems unstoppable - scaling to infinity over some finite time (millions of years??) When and if Earth becomes one large connected “city” the growth hits a wall, or, as Wong & Bartlett (2022) suggest - an asymptotic burnout - aka, civilization hits a limit of growth and either collapses or awakens. Is this the Fermi paradox and why we don’t see other extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy? Have most collapsed?

Read more here: Asymptotic burnout and homeostaticawakening: a possible solution to theFermi paradox?

Could Extraterrestrials be Spreading Biological Life?

It is a well-known hypothesis (but not fully agreed upon) by astrobiologists that extraterrestrial life could have hitched a ride on some interstellar cometary objects like 3I/Atlas (the unusual elongated comet that entered our Solar System recently) that have entered ours and other solar systems. This theory is known as panspermia - and both Carl Sagan and Avi Loeb have postulated that the biological seeds of intelligent life may have arrived via these comets spreading the material in stellar systems.

Loeb has even suggested that extraterrestrials may be spreading life across the galaxy as a fertilization mission. You can read more here: Did 3I/ATLAS Deliver Extrasolar Life to Our Backyard?

Could Different Arrangements of Matter Become Conscious?

Well, it is interesting when philosophers jump in on extraterrestrial life. Pober & Schwitzgebel (2026) published a recent and very speculative paper arguing on how extraterrestrial consciousness could arise in different arrangements of matter (think of what biological constructs are needed for human consciousness to arise). Their logic is simple:

  P1: The universe contains at least a thousand different behaviorally sophisticated species
  P2: These species have substantially different substrates

  P3: Some of these species with substantially different substrates are conscious

  Conclusion: Therefore, consciousness is possible in substantially different substrates

Adding some other thoughts - each galaxy has over a million planets - combine to that a relaxation of the constraint that it must be the same substrates as on Earth. Interesting to speculate on, but in terms of the levels of argument, it's a Level 4.

You can read the paper here: Substrate Flexibility and the Copernican Principle of Consciousness