UAP Council Member Says Disclosure Is Moving Too Fast

Peter Skafish is not asking for disclosure to accelerate. He is asking whether anyone has thought through the speed it is already traveling at, and he said plainly that he would prefer it slowed down.

Skafish is a sociocultural anthropologist with a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and he co-founded the Sol Foundation. According to his Sol Foundation biography, he has held faculty and research positions at Berkeley, McGill University, the Collège de France and Bauhaus University in Weimar. In June 2026 he was named to the UAP Science Advisory Council chaired by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. 

In an interview on That UFO Podcast, Skafish said the office the council primarily interfaces with is ODNI — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and argued that this fact alone signals something about the thinking inside that office. He also made two interesting claims. He stated he knows personally that a crash retrieval and reverse engineering effort exists and that what is being worked on is not of human origin. He also said he is among a small number of people who know that David Grusch was telling the truth as he understood it, and that Grusch’s sources were not secondhand.

He argued that the executive branch and Congress have now placed the government in a position where acknowledgement becomes close to unavoidable, because for the first time in roughly eight decades a president has ordered declassification and attached the office itself to that order. He credited Eric Burlison, Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Burchett, with support from Jared Moskowitz, for building what he described as a working foothold for governance rather than oversight alone. The risk, according to him, is a government pushed into acknowledging something before it has decided what it is acknowledging, who authorized it, and how the rest of the world will be informed.

On the criticism that the council reviews only unclassified material, Skafish reframed the complaint. He suggested that a clearance would silence the scientists who received it, removing their findings from public discussion permanently. He acknowledged the harder problem underneath it, which is that someone must still convert classified material into a form researchers can legally examine, and he did not claim that problem has been solved.

Skafish said that if any de facto interaction exists between government and non-human intelligence, no Congress authorized it, no treaty was ratified, and it would likely fail a constitutional test. He was careful to state he is not claiming this happened but his argument is that this exposure, rather than the craft itself, explains eighty years of silence, and that the damage lands on government either way, whether officials knew or did not know.

Peter Skafish

He also lowered expectations for the file releases, comparing them to the declassification of Kennedy assassination records, where decades of partial disclosure still produced no clear public answer. Fragmentary documents, he said, do not assemble themselves. Finally, he argued that the field has spent too long on propulsion and materials, which he calls precursor questions, while avoiding the occupant reports that he describes as a constitutive feature of the data itself.

Sources

That UFO Podcast. (2026, July 16). The UFO occupants: Living beings, avatars or AI? | Peter Skafish [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjIgsNxbtXc