After UAP moved into Congress, PURSUE and mainstream media, Neil deGrasse Tyson decided he had a book-length answer for the public. But his answer is still basically Sagan-style skepticism — and critics like Avi Loeb argue that Tyson is not engaging the strongest modern scientific case for looking harder.
Neil deGrasse Tyson wanted to be abducted by aliens “ever since childhood,” he wrote in his new book, Take Me to Your Leader.
“The more alone I was and the more secluded the observing site, the greater my desire for a beam of light to come down from the sky and take me away,” Tyson wrote. “This sentiment was especially stoked at the summits of mountaintops, surrounded by low-lying clouds below, at observatories in the Chilean Andes, where I obtained data for my PhD thesis. Just me, my telescopes, and the universe. The desire to be abducted was driven entirely by my cosmic curiosity.” (Take Me to Your Leader)
But the highly skeptical book makes it clear that Tyson doesn’t think there is evidence that some unidentified anomalous phenomena could be caused by nonhuman intelligence.
Contrast that with the work of Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb who was recently named as the leader of the new UAP science advisory council established by the Trump administration. (Loeb Announcement)
Both Loeb’s announcement and Tyson’s book come amid ongoing disclosure news including files recently released by executive order, congressional mandate and the FOIA process.
Loeb and Tyson have each played a public role in the ongoing UAP debate.
Loeb has pushed for years to bring more of the scientific method to studying UAP while Tyson has largely echoed a message of nothing to see here.
The debate has a historical echo. Before Tyson and Loeb, there was Carl Sagan and J. Allen Hynek — the famous astronomer warning the public against UFO belief, and the former Air Force debunker who spent twenty years dismissing cases before concluding that ridicule had been doing the work that science was supposed to do. The parallel is not perfect, but it is not flattering to Tyson either.
Will the Real UFO Scientist Please Stand Up?
Tyson said that he decided to write the book after watching recent congressional UFO hearings and seeing both parties interested in the issue.
“When I saw it hit that level, I realized I have something to contribute,” Tyson said. (AP News)
Tyson spends much of the book arguing that there is not enough evidence to conclude that UAP could be caused by nonhuman intelligence.
Tyson’s skeptical stance can be summarized by a quote from the end of his book:
“The existence of Aliens on Earth has an uncounted number of believers, even though nobody has ever credibly brought forth an Alien for examination by astrobiologists and other scientists,” Tyson wrote. “Until that happens, like it or not, Alien visitations will remain a belief system like any other.”
More succinctly he simply argues: “Trust your scientists.”
Fair enough, but which scientists should we trust?
Experts like Loeb argue that Tyson may not be the person best positioned to answer the UAP question.
“He’s not a practicing scientist, he didn’t publish a single scientific paper over the past 20 years, but somehow he is portraying himself as if he represents science, or in particular astrophysics,” Loeb told me. “I call people like that the Kardashian of science, in the sense that they’re science influencers.”
Loeb said one way you can evaluate whether someone is a scientist versus a “science influencer” is by looking at their curriculum vitae.
Loeb’s Harvard CV describes him as the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science and former chair of Harvard’s Astronomy Department. It also lists hundreds of scientific papers. (Harvard.edu)
Tyson’s CV lists his most recent research publication as a 2008 Astrophysical Journal Letters paper, with earlier research publications listed in 2007 and before. (Tyson CV)
“When I wrote my first popular book, Extraterrestrial, he was very critical and ridiculed this subject… [the book] was mostly about the interstellar object, Oumuamua,” Loeb said. “But the point is, now he has a new book out, and suddenly that’s his territory, and he claims ownership, appears on podcasts and talks about it, so when the wind blows in a direction that makes this subject more popular, you would see him there.”
Tyson and Loeb have addressed each other before.
In a 2024 Medium essay, Loeb cited an email in which Tyson wrote to him “Pleased to see an extraordinary explanation in place of a prosaic one,” quoting Loeb’s earlier speculation that ‘Oumuamua could be “a fully operational probe” from “an alien civilization.”
Loeb had replied: “I enjoy the challenge of going against the wind. It is fun. You should try it sometime.” (Medium)
For Loeb the answer isn’t to wait for the government to release an alien body before doing more science about UAP. The answer is to build the instruments, collect better data, classify what is ordinary and isolate what remains anomalous.
Michael Shermer, another prominent skeptic, was chosen to represent this position for the scientific advisory council. Tyson isn’t involved.
In addition to the recent announcement about the UAP Scientific council, Loeb spoke at the Disclosure Forum in Washington, D.C. on June 25 alongside speakers including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence Christopher Mellon. The event was hosted by the Disclosure Foundation. (Disclosure Forum)
Other experts in the field of UAP study also expressed skepticism about Tyson’s ability to effectively speak credibly on the UAP topic.
“Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has postured as the authority on science in America … should be ashamed of himself for the unscientific way that over so many years he has been part of the cover up, unwittingly probably, but frankly part of the cover up,” UAP journalist Ross Coulthart said on NewsNation in reference to Tyson’s book. “Because he, more than anyone almost in establishment science in the United States, has done his level best to ridicule, mock, stigmatize and criticize people who come forward with allegations of nonhuman intelligence.” (NewsNation)
“What a pompous bombast. The simple fact is, Neil deGreasse Tyson has ignored for years … the growing evidence from first hand witnesses, people speaking with direct knowledge of a legacy retrieval and reverse engineering program,” Coulthart said.
Coulthart’s alternative to Tyson’s skepticism is an investigative reporter’s case for disclosure: UAP are real enough to matter, witnesses and whistleblowers deserve to be taken seriously, governments and defense/intelligence agencies know more than they have told the public, and decades of stigma have helped keep one of the world’s biggest accountability stories hidden in plain sight, according to Coulthart’s book In Plain Sight. (In Plain Sight)
Robert Powell, co-founder and executive board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, said that Tyson doesn’t seem to be deeply knowledgeable about the UAP topic.
“I doubt that Tyson has seriously studied the subject. And there’s nothing wrong with being skeptical, I’m skeptical. But there’s a difference to me between dismissing a subject based on what you read in the public newspapers or hearing in the media, than actually studying the subject and then dismissing it,” Powell explained to me. “And I mean in depth study.”