We could be closer to confirming the presence of extraterrestrial life than ever before. NASA has officially kicked off its study of UFOs (officially UAPs, or unidentified aerial phenomena), and 16 top scientists and scholars will be leading the effort.
In a statement released Friday, NASA announced that it had chosen the individuals responsible for conducting its independent UAP study, which is separate from the Department of Defense’s UAP Task Force and its successor, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group. The team is impressively diverse: Two astrophysicists, two policy specialists, two aviation specialists, an oceanographer, an AI startup founder, a science journalist, a planetary scientist, a former NASA astronaut, a telescope scientist, a space infrastructure consultant, an electrical and computer engineer, and a physicist each made the cut.
Beginning this week, the team will be responsible for building a foundation upon which NASA and other agencies can continue studying UAPs. Focusing entirely on unclassified data, they’ll help determine how information sourced from civilians, government entities, and private enterprises can be analyzed and potentially used for future UAP discernment. The study will coincide with NASA’s aircraft safety goals, given UAP’s potential effect on air safety and national security overall.
A UFO photographed over Lake Cote, Costa Rica in September 1971. (Photo: Instituto Geográfico Nacional de Costa Rica/Wikimedia Commons)
“Exploring the unknown in space and the atmosphere is at the heart of who we are at NASA,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. “Understanding the data we have surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena is critical to helping us draw scientific conclusions about what is happening in our skies. Data is the language of scientists and makes the unexplainable, explainable.”
Interest in official UAP research has been growing over the last several months. In May, the Pentagon briefed Congress on a number of UAP sightings, only one of which has since been explained. The hearing, along with the 2021 preliminary UAP assessment that inspired it, earmarked this decade as the first in which the US government has (publicly) shown a serious interest in investigating what could be otherworldly phenomena.
According to NASA chief Bill Nelson, humans very well could have witnessed extraterrestrial activity in recent years. During a live-streamed interview with the University of Virginia last year, Nelson said hundreds of acknowledged UAP sightings still lack explanations. “I’ve talked to those pilots and they know they saw something, and their radars locked on to it. And they don’t know what it is. And we don’t know what it is,” he said. “We hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology. But it’s something… Who am I to say planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilized and organized like ours?”
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