Government UAP Council Member STILL Wants Disclosure Slowed Down

Peter Skafish, an anthropologist and co-founder of the Sol Foundation, has spent the past several weeks making the case that the United States is not ready for full UAP disclosure, even as he sits on the government body built to help deliver it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1zAjUhJD2s

Skafish holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from UC Berkeley and now serves as the anthropology seat on the new UAP Science Advisory Council, chaired by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. According to an interview on That UFO Podcast roughly a week earlier, Skafish said the office the council primarily interfaces with is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and that fact alone should tell people something about the thinking inside that office. In that same interview, Skafish made two claims that stood out from everything else he said. He stated he personally knows a crash retrieval and reverse engineering effort exists involving technology not built by humans, and he said he is among a small number of people who believe David Grusch’s sources were firsthand rather than secondhand.

According to that earlier conversation, Skafish said the government now finds itself close to an unavoidable acknowledgment, whether that lands in two years, five years, or ten. His reasoning was that a sitting president had, for the first time in roughly eighty years of secrecy, ordered declassification and tied the executive branch itself to that order. Once that seal is placed, he said, there is no reversing it.

Skafish also addressed why the council reviews only unclassified material, a limitation that has drawn criticism. He compared a security clearance to a lock rather than a key, explaining that once a scientist is read into classified material, everything they learn leaves the public conversation permanently. He raised a separate legal question that received less attention at the time, asking what authorization, if any, would have covered a government interaction with non-human intelligence, and whether such an interaction could have been constitutional without a treaty or a congressional vote. He was careful to say he was not confirming that any such interaction occurred.

When I spoke with Skafish this week, he stood by everything he had said prior. Asked directly whether he wanted to walk back his comments about slowing disclosure, he said he did not, adding that disclosure carries serious social, cultural, geopolitical, and human consequences depending on what turns out to be true. He did not elaborate further on what those consequences might look like. What he was clear about is that a basic public acknowledgment from the executive branch should come soon, even if the fuller release of facts behind it should not.

Peter Skafish

Skafish also clarified a widely repeated misunderstanding tied to retired Army Colonel Karl Nell, who served as the Army liaison to the government’s UAP Task Force from 2021 to 2022 and worked directly with Grusch. According to Skafish, Nell never predicted a fixed date for UFO disclosure. Instead, at the 2023 Sol Foundation Symposium, Nell laid out a conditional timeline, suggesting that if a UAP Disclosure Act had passed that year, with a review board active by 2024, full findings could reasonably reach the public by around 2030. Skafish said that window could move earlier given where things stand today, and separately floated 2028 as a plausible year for a basic presidential acknowledgment, tied to the end of a presidential term and the appeal of a legacy statement.

On the UAP council Advisory itself, Skafish confirmed it receives no federal funding and that every member, including himself, Garry Nolan, Avi Loeb, Tim Gallaudet, and Kevin Knuth, works without pay (that the public knows of). He said the council should not be compared to AARO, the Pentagon’s paid, official UAP office, given the difference in budget and staffing. Asked about the PURSUE Task Force, Skafish said he believes people working in good faith inside government may already know a legacy program is real and would like a path to acknowledge it publicly, a comment he said was not speculation on his part.