The NASA Investigation of Unidentified Anomaly Phenomena Revealed by the Independent Report on Roswell’s Event in New Mexico
Seventy-six years after the infamous Roswell incident, when a high-altitude balloon—or something—crashed in southeastern New Mexico, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has now officially weighed in on UFO sightings. They have not proved or disproven the existence of aliens. Instead, the report released today by the agency’s independent study team describes how NASA should assess new reports of “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAP), a term that federal agencies use in place of UFOs (unidentified flying objects). Machine learning and artificial intelligence should be used in the agency’s analysis, but they need better quality data before making use of them.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson, who was once a senator from Florida and flew in the space shuttle Columbia, wants to shift the discussion about UAPs to science.
While emphasizing that “the NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin,” Nelson noted that “we don’t know what these UAP are. The NASA mission is to find the unknown.
NASA has actively looked for potential signs of life on other planets and moons in the solar system and beyond, but it hasn’t traditionally spent much time thinking about “little green men” closer to home.
The new report offers NASA a path to contribute to this area of research, and officials embraced the idea of creating a director for UAP research to help guide and coordinate NASA’s efforts.
They declined to name the person appointed to that position, however. Dan Evans, an assistant deputy associate administrator at NASA’s science mission directorate, said that the name of the person was not revealed because they didn’t want to cause a problem for them.
Evans says that some of the threats and harassment have been beyond the pale. “That’s in part why we are not splashing the name of our new director out there.”
Unexplained Flying Objects: NASA, the Pentagon, and Other Aggregate Advisors (Report on the “Show me UAPs” Campaign)
The report says that the vast majority of flying objects are mundane and can be attributed to things like weather balloons.
Still, not all can be easily explained, and the NASA advisors say that any sightings that appear to deviate from known technology’s constraints on velocities and accelerations “are scientifically interesting.”
The Department of Defense now has an office to look into unexplained incidents, while Congress is starting to pay more attention to them. When a former government worker made headlines when he told lawmakers that government officials had recovered alien “biologics” from crash sites, the Pentagon said such claims could not be substantiated.
The 16 researchers and other advisors who drafted recommendations to NASA weren’t asked to weigh in on the nature of previous unidentifiable observations, but rather to tell the agency what kind of data was currently available or could be collected for objective study.
Already-planned large-sky surveys by telescopes such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory could look for unusual objects beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, the report says. And programs to look for near-Earth objects, such as potentially dangerous asteroids, collect a lot of information about phenomena close to the Earth’s atmosphere.
The report did identify some data gaps, such as the lack of a standardized system that would allow civilian pilots to make reports of unusual sightings. Under current circumstances, people are told to contact law enforcement or other organizations. “As a result, the collection of data is sparse, unsystematic, and lacks any curation or vetting protocols,” the report notes, adding that NASA could offer guidance to other government agencies on the best ways to collect such data.
The panel said that NASA should try to explore the viability of this kind of public engagement and data collection because smartphone-based apps might offer a way to crowdsource observations from the public.
Finally, the advisors say that NASA has an established record of openness and public trust that could benefit the study of UFOs, and the agency could help destigmatize the reporting of these sightings so that they can be studied more robustly.
UAPs, by the way, are the polite government name for what we normal people call UFOs, or unidentified flying objects. It seems like a nice jobs program for scientists to investigate unexplained phenomena. But let’s be clear about what’s happening here: this is a government agency that’s noticed UFO boosters are in Congress, and it wants some damn funding.
Look, I don’t think we’re alone in the universe. I suspect that, at minimum, there’s probably plenty of bacteria on habitable planets. The question of whether we have intelligent life is a difficult one, and I am skeptical because I don’t think we have it. I am pretty sure that there is something weird going on with the planet, so I think it’s unlikely that things are aliens.
One thing that has been around for a long time is aliens. Conspiracy theories are being stonewalled. This tends to be used as proof by the true believers that they don’t want you to know. When I see things like the Pentagon setting up a task force to look at unexplained flying objects, I think that should be a corrective measure. We will look. That’s part of what you see in NASA’s news release, too: “NASA will do this work transparently for the benefit of humanity,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a press release.
Most UFO (or UAP, or whatever you want to call them) sightings don’t have real data behind them. Nelson said in the press conference that he did not mean that as a knock. That’s one of the challenges here! A lot of military pilots claim to have seen weird stuff while flying. I believe they did! I just don’t know what they saw. It could be anything — secret spy planes from some other country, weather balloons, bizarre atmospheric phenomena, or something else we haven’t yet figured out.
NASA has a budget that is decided by Congress. If Congress is into UFOs, then why shouldn’t NASA get some budget for that? Makes sense, great administrative decision, hats off to management. Nelson said in the press conference that he wanted to shift the discussion about aliens from sensationalism to science. What does science always need more of? Money.