The team will collect data on “events in the sky that cannot be identified as airplanes or known natural phenomena – from a scientific point of view,” the agency said.
NASA has said it is interested in UAP in terms of security and safety. There was no evidence that UAPs were aliens, NASA added. The study will begin this fall and is expected to take nine months.
“NASA believes that scientific discovery tools are powerful and applied here,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Scientific Missions Directorate at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC.
“We have access to a wide range of Earth observations from space – and that’s the lifeblood of research. We have the tools and the team to help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That’s the very definition of science. That’s what we do.”
The team will be led by astrophysicist David Spergel, who is president of the Simons Foundation in New York.
NASA said the limited number of UAP observations made it difficult to draw scientific conclusions about the nature of such events.
“Given the lack of observations, our first task is simply to gather the most robust set of data we can,” said Spergel, an honorary professor and former chairman of the Department of Astrophysics at Princeton University in New Jersey. “We will find out what data – from civil, governmental, non-profit organizations, companies – exist, what else we should try to collect and how best to analyze them.
The first step for the team would be to try to determine which UAPs are natural, NASA said.
In May, lawmakers held the first public hearing in Congress on UFOs in decades. The hearing was an important moment on a controversial topic that has long been shifted to the periphery of public policy. Government officials have warned that the UAP must be investigated and taken seriously as a potential threat to national security. And a report on UAPs published last year by the US intelligence community attracted a lot of attention.
The search for life
NASA has long had the task of finding life elsewhere, which is why astrobiology programs are part of the agency’s focus, Zurbuchen said. The Perseverance rover is currently searching for signs of ancient life that may have once existed on Mars, while future missions are being developed to search for signs of life in the ocean worlds in our solar system. The agency is seeking to explore the unknown in the air and space, Zurbuchen said.
“We are looking at the question of whether certain circles are actually part, if you will, of the ladder of life that led us to where we are,” he told a news conference on Thursday.
The agency will approach the UAP study like any other research – taking an area that is poor in data and making it worthy of research and analysis.
“There are many times when something that seemed almost magical turned out to be a new scientific effect,” Zurbuchen said.
Given the national security and air safety issues raised by the UAP, scientists want to look at the observations and determine whether they are natural or need to be explained in some other way.
While talking about UAP in a traditional scientific environment can be viewed from below or seen as something unrelated to science, Zurbuchen “vehemently opposes it.”
“I really believe that the quality of science is measured not only by the results behind it, but also by the issues we are ready to tackle with science,” he said.
NASA officials have been considering studying the UAP formally for a long time, but wanted to make sure it was the right approach, Zurbuchen confirmed. The quality of research must be the same, regardless of the subject.
But this study will be completely unclassified and will be in the public domain, and NASA’s Directorate of Scientific Missions is in charge. Zurbuchen said he was unaware of any previous systematic UAP data research by NASA.
The aim of the study is to propose a research program that can be implemented once researchers have evaluated existing data and need to be reviewed.
The full report will be made available to the public and the research team will hold a public meeting to discuss the findings, said Daniel Evans, an assistant to NASA’s scientific missions directorate, during a news conference. Like other standard NASA grant review panels, the budget estimated for this project is between tens of thousands of dollars and no more than $ 100,000, Evans said.
Although it is difficult to predict what the study will reveal, Spergel said that “we need to be open to the idea that we are looking at several different phenomena.”
“I think we need to approach all these issues with a sense of humility,” Spergel said. “I spent most of my career as a cosmologist. I can tell you that we do not know what makes up 95% of the universe. So there are things we don’t understand. I hope this research will move us forward to understand these phenomena better. But at the end of the day, we can conclude that we still don’t understand many aspects of them, and we may have a roadmap on how to make progress. “
Ross Levitt contributed to this report.
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