WASHINGTON – NASA will commission a small independent study of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), a move the agency says is part of its desire to support risky research that has the potential for high profits.
The agency announced on June 9 that it will set up an independent team of researchers who, starting in early autumn, will spend about nine months researching what data is available for UAP and making recommendations on what additional data to collect to find out. better phenomena. A final report will be made public at the end of the study.
Observations of UAPs have attracted considerable attention in recent years, including studies by two groups set up by the Ministry of Defense. However, there is no consensus to explain such observations, mostly by military pilots, with justifications ranging from modern weapons and alien objects to natural phenomena or various objects such as balloons.
The purpose of the study, said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science, told reporters “to take an area that is relatively poor in data and turn it into a field that is much richer in data. and therefore worthy of research investigation and analysis. “
The study will be led by David Spergel, an astrophysicist who is president of the Simons Foundation. “Our plan is to conduct an open investigation, which we hope will improve our understanding, so that when this is done, we will have at least a roadmap on how to move forward,” he said during the conversation.
He later said that the only preliminary idea he had of the UAP entering the study was that the data could be explained by several different phenomena. NASA said in a statement that “there is no evidence that UAPs are aliens.”
“Never underestimate what nature can do,” Zurbuchen said. “Sometimes we have this statement that we understand the natural world and everything that is not explained by the laws of nature that we have at the moment is somehow not natural. I really believe that there is still a lot to learn. “
Dan Evans, assistant deputy research assistant at NASA’s scientific missions directorate, said the research team will include scientists, aeronautics experts and “practitioners.” The study, he said, will be set up as commissions that NASA regularly sets up to review grant proposals, and will have a similar budget, which he says is unlikely to exceed $ 100,000.
With this limited budget and schedule, Evans said the focus will be on identifying existing data and data gaps, not on finding an explanation or explanations for the UAP. “The first step in any research is to find out what data there is,” he said. “We will not actually analyze this data directly within this budget. This is just the first step: what data is there that can be used to address the problem.
Earlier in the day, Zurbuchen announced the UAP study at a meeting of the Space Research Council of the National Academies (SSB). He presented it as an example of “high-risk and high-impact” research, which he believes the agency needs to do more.
“Risk-taking is necessary for innovation and leadership,” he said at the meeting. “We argue that failure may actually be an option. We think about failure all the time and we feel comfortable with it. ”
He told the meeting that in discussions with scientists, 8 out of 10 told him that the agency was not doing enough high-risk / high-impact research. Reviewers of grant proposals found that 3% of these proposals fall into the high risk / high impact category. “I feel like it has to be bigger.”
At both the SSB meeting and the reporter’s interview, Zurbuchen acknowledged the “reputation risk” associated with studying UAP. “In a traditional type of scientific environment, talking about some of these issues can be considered a sale or not a real science,” he said. “It simply came to our notice then. I really believe that the quality of science is not measured by the results behind it, but also by the issues that we are ready to deal with science. “
SSB members showed little apparent interest in the UAP study, which he announced, using a question and answer session to raise issues such as research funding and demographics, as well as the status of specific missions and programs.
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