Omer Eldadi

Overview

Omer Eldadi is a psychologist whose research spans team cognition, communication, decision-making under pressure and the performance of expert groups. He completed his PhD at Reichman University and in 2026 received a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to conduct research with Abraham Loeb at Harvard's Center for Astrophysics. Fulbright describes his current project as applying social and performance psychology to anomalous phenomena, including how scientific teams reason and communicate under uncertainty and how research communities respond to evidence that challenges prevailing paradigms. [S1]

Eldadi is also a founding member of the UAP Science Advisory Council (UAPSAC), where public rosters assign him a combined role in data management, artificial intelligence and human or social psychology. [S1][S2][S3]

His relevance to UAPRAD extends beyond the council.

He has peer-reviewed research on team cognition and expert communication, co-authored the peer-reviewed Interstellar Object Significance Scale with Gershon Tenenbaum and Avi Loeb, contributed to a 2026 psychological-preparedness report concerning UAP/NHI disclosure and co-authored a policy preprint arguing for greater support of technosignature research. [S4][S5][S6][S7]

The common thread is not proof of extraordinary phenomena. It is the problem of decision-making when evidence is incomplete, socially contested or potentially high consequence.

Psychology and team-cognition background

Eldadi completed his doctoral work at the B. Ivcher School of Psychology at Reichman University. His pre-UAP publication record is rooted in sport, performance and social psychology. [S1][S4]

A 2025 review with Gershon Tenenbaum in Psychology of Sport and Exercise examined team cognition: the shared knowledge, coordination and communication structures that allow groups to perform effectively under time pressure. [S4]

A separate 2025 study in the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology examined verbal communication and coordinated effort in expert and nonexpert esports teams. [S5]

These subjects are directly relevant to high-stakes scientific or intelligence teams.

Groups confronting uncertain information can fail in several ways:

• poor information sharing;
• excessive deference to authority;
• fragmented expertise;
• premature consensus;
• confirmation bias;
• communication overload.

Eldadi's psychological background therefore contributes to UAP research at the level of group reasoning rather than physical sensor interpretation alone.

Naval experience and high-stakes teams

Fulbright's biography records that before his academic career Eldadi graduated from the Israeli Naval Academy and served seven years as an operational naval officer, including as executive officer of a missile ship. [S1]

This is relevant to his research interest in expert coordination under pressure.

Military and aviation UAP reports frequently arise in environments where multiple people and technical systems must integrate incomplete information quickly.

Operational experience does not make Eldadi an authority on the physical origin of UAP.

It provides contextual experience with the organisational conditions under which unusual observations may be reported and interpreted.

Fulbright project at Harvard

In 2026, Eldadi was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to work with Abraham Loeb at Harvard's Center for Astrophysics. [S1]

The project is unusually interdisciplinary.

Fulbright describes it as applying social and performance psychology to anomalous scientific phenomena, with attention to:

• research-team reasoning;
• communication;
• decision-making under uncertainty;
• resistance to evidence that challenges prevailing paradigms.

This creates an important methodological opportunity and risk.

The opportunity is to study how scientific communities respond to anomalies without assuming that rejection or acceptance is purely rational.

The risk is that the language of "paradigm resistance" can itself create a preferred narrative in which scientific criticism is interpreted as sociological obstruction rather than substantive evidential disagreement.

A rigorous programme must therefore be capable of detecting bias in both directions.

Interstellar Object Significance Scale

Eldadi, Tenenbaum and Loeb published the Interstellar Object Significance Scale (IOSS), also called the Loeb Scale, in the International Journal of Astrobiology in 2025. [S6]

The scale proposes a 0–10 framework for evaluating interstellar objects.

Lower levels concern natural or expected observations, intermediate levels concern increasing anomaly, and the highest levels are reserved for evidence of artificial origin.

The authors apply the framework to objects including 1I/'Oumuamua, 2I/Borisov and 3I/ATLAS.

The paper's relevance to UAP is methodological.

It attempts to prevent every unusual observation from being discussed using the same undifferentiated language.

A classification system can force researchers to specify how much evidence supports anomaly and what additional observations would justify escalation.

However, the numerical appearance of a scale can create false precision if categories depend on disputed assumptions.

The score does not replace the evidence.

It organises interpretation of the evidence.

Technosignatures and scientific stigma

In March 2026, Eldadi, Tenenbaum and Loeb posted a policy paper titled Closing the Technosignature Gap: A Policy Framework for Rebalancing Astrobiology Investment. [S7]

The authors argue that technosignature research has historically received very little federal support relative to biosignature research and discuss the role of the "giggle factor" in discouraging study of extraterrestrial technology.

This argument overlaps with UAP discourse because stigma is frequently cited as a barrier to reporting and research.

The correct evidential interpretation is limited.

A research field can be unfairly stigmatised and still contain weak claims.

Conversely, a topic can have weak historical evidence and still become scientifically productive if better methods are developed.

Stigma is therefore a variable affecting research participation and funding, not evidence that the contested hypothesis is true.

UAP Science Advisory Council

Eldadi appeared in the initial UAPSAC roster and Fulbright calls him a founding member. [S1][S2]

His assigned responsibilities have been described as data management, AI and human/social psychology. [S2][S3]

This combination is unusual but coherent.

Data systems do not interpret themselves.

A multidisciplinary council needs:

• database design;
• shared classification standards;
• communication across disciplines;
• structured uncertainty;
• mechanisms for resolving disagreement.

Psychological research on team cognition can therefore inform how a scientific council actually works.

The contribution becomes measurable if UAPSAC publishes procedures, decision rules, dissent protocols or reproducible case assessments.

Psychological impact of disclosure

Eldadi was one of six authors of the Disclosure Foundation's 2026 report The Psychological Impact of UAP/NHI Disclosure: A Framework for Understanding Public Response and Preparedness. [S8]

The report synthesises literature from psychology, public health and crisis communication and argues against simplistic assumptions that disclosure would necessarily produce universal mass panic.

It instead proposes heterogeneous response, with most people expected to adapt while smaller vulnerable populations could experience greater disruption.

The report explicitly states that its analysis is constrained by the absence of privileged classified information and by the hypothetical nature of the strongest disclosure scenarios. [S8]

This is important.

The report is not empirical evidence that NHI exists and not a direct study of an actual NHI disclosure event.

Its value is contingency planning.

Psychology of scientific disagreement

Eldadi's emerging work raises a subtle question for UAP research: when does resistance to an anomaly represent healthy scepticism, and when does it represent sociological inertia?

There is no simple answer.

Scientific history contains cases in which initially anomalous observations eventually contributed to major discoveries.

It also contains far more cases in which anomalies disappeared through improved measurement, calibration or ordinary explanation.

A psychology of paradigm resistance therefore has to avoid assuming that dissenters are psychologically blocked.

It should compare:

• quality of evidence;
• strength of prior models;
• transparency of competing hypotheses;
• willingness to update;
• professional incentives.

The ideal research output would study these processes empirically rather than use historical examples only rhetorically.

Data management and AI

Public UAPSAC rosters also assign Eldadi responsibility for data management and AI.

His published academic record is strongest in psychology rather than computer science.

Accordingly, UAPRAD should avoid describing him as a primary AI engineer in the same sense as Richard Cloete unless future technical work establishes that role.

The most defensible interpretation is interdisciplinary data coordination and the human factors of analysis.

This distinction prevents a broad council label from overstating individual technical specialisation.

Evidence analysis

Eldadi's relevance is unusually interdisciplinary.

His mainstream research demonstrates expertise in group cognition, communication and performance.

His interstellar-object paper demonstrates participation in quantitative anomaly-classification design.

His UAP disclosure work addresses societal psychology.

His UAPSAC role combines those elements inside an active advisory body.

The current weakness is that much of his specifically UAP-focused institutional work is new.

There is not yet a large published record showing how his psychological methods changed a UAPSAC case outcome.

His strongest current case for inclusion is therefore methodological breadth rather than a particular UAP discovery.

What is established

• Eldadi completed a PhD in psychology at Reichman University. [S1]
• He has peer-reviewed research on team cognition and expert communication. [S4][S5]
• He was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to work with Avi Loeb at Harvard. [S1]
• His Fulbright project explicitly applies psychology to scientific reasoning about anomalous phenomena. [S1]
• He is a founding UAPSAC member with a public role spanning data management, AI and psychology. [S1][S2][S3]
• He co-authored the peer-reviewed Interstellar Object Significance Scale. [S6]
• He co-authored a 2026 technosignature funding-policy paper. [S7]
• He contributed to the 2026 UAP/NHI psychological-preparedness report. [S8]

What is not established

• Research on paradigm resistance does not establish that scientific scepticism of UAP is irrational.
• Stigma against a topic does not increase the physical probability of its extraordinary hypotheses.
• The IOSS numerical scale does not independently verify artificial origin for any interstellar object.
• Psychological preparedness research does not establish NHI.
• UAPSAC's broad "AI" label should not be treated as proof that Eldadi is the council's primary machine-learning engineer.
• His naval background is relevant to high-stakes team cognition, not direct evidence concerning UAP origin.

Missing or unavailable evidence

The most valuable future evidence would be publication of Eldadi's Fulbright research methods and UAPSAC-specific outputs.

Questions worth evaluating include:

• how council members communicate uncertainty;
• how dissent is recorded;
• whether groupthink is measured;
• whether confidence estimates change after cross-disciplinary review;
• how data categories are standardised.

A preregistered and comparative study of scientific teams investigating anomalous data could make a genuinely novel contribution to UAP methodology.

Overall assessment

Omer Eldadi is a strong addition to the UAPRAD Humans index because he addresses a part of UAP science that is easy to overlook: the quality of the reasoning group.

Better sensors do not guarantee better conclusions if analysts communicate poorly, converge prematurely or mistake institutional confidence for evidential strength.

Eldadi's background in expert-team cognition provides a legitimate framework for studying those problems.

His work on the Interstellar Object Significance Scale also shows an interest in formalising how anomaly levels are communicated rather than treating "unexplained" as a binary category.

That approach can improve UAP analysis if the categories remain subordinate to evidence rather than creating artificial numerical certainty.

His newer research on technosignatures and disclosure psychology pushes closer to controversial territory.

The correct UAPRAD treatment is to distinguish research on how communities respond to extraordinary possibilities from evidence that those possibilities have been realised.

Eldadi's future importance will depend on whether UAPSAC and his Harvard work produce transparent empirical research on reasoning under uncertainty.

At present, his strongest contribution is the attempt to make human cognition itself part of the UAP methodology rather than an invisible assumption.

Confidence by proposition

Sources

[S1] Primary programme source — Fulbright Israel. Omer Eldadi postdoctoral fellowship biography, July 2026. https://www.fulbright.org.il/node/4837

[S2] Primary council-roster source — Disclosure Foundation. UAP Science Advisory Council. https://disclosure.org/news/uap-science-advisory-council

[S3] Independent government-sourced reporting — DefenseScoop. UAPSAC/Governance Board, 17 June 2026. https://defensescoop.com/2026/06/17/new-science-advisory-council-forms-to-help-us-government-resolve-the-uap-mystery/

[S4] Peer-reviewed psychology — Omer Eldadi and Gershon Tenenbaum. "Team cognition (TC) in sport: Foundations, development, and performance implications," Psychology of Sport and Exercise 80, 102927 (2025). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40582387/

[S5] Peer-reviewed psychology — Omer Eldadi, Sarah Jeanne Fitoussi and Gershon Tenenbaum. "Verbal Communication, Coordinated Effort, and Performance in Esports Teams," Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology 47(5), 320–332 (2025). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40882969/

[S6] Peer-reviewed astrobiology — Omer Eldadi, Gershon Tenenbaum and Abraham Loeb. "The interstellar object significance scale (Loeb Scale): astronomical classification of interstellar objects," International Journal of Astrobiology 24, e22 (2025). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/interstellar-object-significance-scale-loeb-scale-astronomical-classification-of-interstellar-objects/33F927C9600721DF14D1AA8525D7EDC0

[S7] Policy preprint — Omer Eldadi, Gershon Tenenbaum and Abraham Loeb. Closing the Technosignature Gap: A Policy Framework for Rebalancing Astrobiology Investment, 2026. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6444296

[S8] Research framework — Disclosure Foundation. The Psychological Impact of UAP/NHI Disclosure, 2026. https://disclosure.org/research/psychological-impact-of-uap-nhi-disclosure