NASA’s UFO/UAP study team released its long-awaited first report today, and while its experts found no signs of extraterrestrial origins for reported sightings, the space agency is appointing a new chief to study the phenomenon.
The independent panel of experts was commissioned in 2022 by NASA in order to inform NASA and other government agencies how data could be collected or analyzed in order to understand the UFOs or now known as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP).
The term UAP was adopted by the U.S. Department of Defense in order to encompass not only objects or events in the air that can’t immediately be identified, but also those under water or in space or that travel between domains.
“The top takeaway from the study is that there is a lot more to learn,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Thursday (Sept. 14) while releasing the report. “The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don’t know what these UAP are.”
To investigate further, NASA is appointing a director of UAP research to develop and oversee UAP research, Nelson announced.
The long-awaited first report of NASA UAP team doesn’t shed much light on what UAPs are but offers recommendations on how NASA might be able to help move the topic forward. In its conclusion, the report argues that NASA can best contribute to the topic by leveraging its Earth observation satellites to help provide better data and evidence of UAP.
During a press briefing held Thursday (Sept. 14) at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., Nelson described the lack of data surrounding the topic, adding that because UFO sightings are often unpredictable and fleeting, they are difficult to study scientifically.
Meanwhile, Dan Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, framed the agency’s UAP study efforts in terms of airspace safety. “The presence of UAP raises serious concerns about the safety of our skies. And it’s this nation’s obligation to determine whether these phenomena pose any potential risks to airspace safety,” Evans said. “Let’s not forget that the first ‘A’ in NASA is aeronautics. So by understanding the nature of UAP, we can ensure that our skies remain a safe space for all.”
UFOs, or UAP, have been a focus of U.S. government scrutiny over the last several years due to former intelligence community personnel and military servicemembers coming forward to share what they claim are encounters with unidentified objects or anomalous phenomena in the skies.
Several former U.S. military aviators have gone public in news media and cable television documentary series in recent years about their sightings of objects that appear to defy conventional understanding of aerodynamics and materials science, behaving in ways that are difficult to explain with known technologies.
A former Pentagon intelligence officer and U.S. Air Force veteran even testified to a congressional subcommittee in July 2023 that the American government has been hiding evidence of crashed UAP and evidence of biological “non-human intelligence.”
