The Unidentified Anomaly: A Report on the First Sixty-Six Years of Roswell Investigation by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration
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. Don’t get too excited: They haven’t proven, or disproven, the existence of aliens. Instead, the report by the independent study team describes how NASA should assess new reports of “unidentified anomalies” (UAP), a term that the federal agencies use in place of unexplained flying objects. It stresses that the agency should make use of machine learning and artificial intelligence as analytical tools, but that first it needs higher quality data to analyze.
Bill Nelson, who was once a senator from Florida and flew in the space shuttle Columbia, stated that NASA wanted to shift the conversation 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 mission of NASA is to find out 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 a roadmap for how NASA could contribute to this area of research, and officials embraced the idea, announcing that the agency had created a new position, a director for UAP research, to help guide and coordinate NASA’s efforts.
They did not name that person who was appointed to that position. Dan Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s science mission directorate, said their unwillingness to reveal the name was partly to protect that person from being hassled by people with strong feelings about UFOs.
Evans says that some of the threats and harassment have been beyond the pale. “That’s why we don’t have a new director’s name out there.”
The Unusual Airborne Phenomena of the U.S.: Why Do We Need Space to Study Strange Objects?
The report says that the vast majority of occurrences are related to mundane airborne objects such as airplanes, drones and weather balloons.
For example, the new report notes that while NASA’s Earth-observing satellites can’t detect small objects, they could help establish whether certain environmental conditions tend to coincide with strange sightings.
The Department of Defense has a special Office to look into unexplained events and the Congress has recently become aware of them. Earlier this year, for example, a former government worker made headlines when he told lawmakers that officials had recovered alien “biologics” from crash sites, but a Pentagon spokesperson said such claims could not be substantiated.
The 16 researchers and other experts who drafted recommendations to NASA were not asked to weigh in on the nature of previously unidentifiable observations, but to tell the agency what data was currently available for study.
Large-sky surveys by telescopes such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory may be able to look for unusual objects beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. 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 points out that NASA currently has no standardized system for collecting civilian reports, and suggests the agency could crowdsource that data via smartphone apps. (Earlier this year, the private company Enigma Labs launched a mobile app that lets people report UFO sightings, then analyzes that data with algorithms.)
Also, smartphone-based apps might offer a way to crowdsource observations from the public, the panel noted, saying that NASA should explore the viability of this kind of public engagement and data collection.
The advisors say that NASA has a good history of openness and public trust, so they can help destigmatize the reporting of unexplained phenomena so that they can be more rigorously studied.