Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb told Newsmax on Saturday that the Pentagon's latest tranche of declassified UFO files points to a serious national security problem, adding that he has been tasked with assembling a UAP Science Advisory Council for the White House, the intelligence community, and the Pentagon.

Loeb, who directs the Galileo Project, appeared on "The Count" hours after the Department of War published its third batch of records under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, known as PURSUE. The release includes 53 documents, 10 images, 6 videos, and 3 NASA audio recordings.

What set the disclosure apart, Loeb said, was a June 5 letter from Jon Kosloski, director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, describing a two-day event in October 2023 in which law enforcement officers reported orbs behaving in unusual ways, including one that split into smaller orbs. AARO could not explain 40% of the phenomena documented in the encounter, he said.

"There is no doubt in my mind that these are real objects," he said. The pressing question, he added, is whether they "represent technologies that adversarial nations are employing for espionage on strategic assets that we have, and that makes it a very serious matter."

Loeb said he had published an essay that morning announcing the science panel and described a team of "young scientists" who would help resolve some of the mysteries. "At the very least, it's a matter of national security," he said.

Pressed on whether the sightings might point to extraterrestrials or to a covert government program, Loeb said he has "not seen clear evidence for anything that is not human-made," though he did not rule it out.

Finding even one object of non-human origin, he said, would be "the icing on the cake of looking through millions of objects" and would rank as the biggest discovery in the history of science.

He argued the universe leaves the question open.

"I do believe that we should be aware: if we have a neighbor, you know, just ignoring that possibility is not a good attitude," Loeb said.

There are "billions of Earth-Sun analogs in the Milky Way galaxy," he added, and humans "came relatively late to the party in the last one-third of cosmic history." A craft moving at Voyager speeds, he said, could cross the galaxy in under a billion years. "We just need to look out to figure it out."

The Pentagon has emphasized that AARO has not found evidence of extraterrestrial technology.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the department is moving "in lockstep" with President Donald Trump to expand transparency on UAP.

The PURSUE archive has logged more than 1.7 billion hits since its May launch.

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