NASA appoints new director for UFO research as panel urges more study

NOW: A discussion of the report by the unidentified anomalous phenomena report (UAP) independent study team.

Read the full report (PDF): https://t.co/uYhsJ6stRR https://t.co/FuftbhwL4D

— NASA (@NASA) September 14, 2023

“We will use NASA’s expertise to analyse UAP. We will use artificial intelligence and machine learning for anomalies as we have searched for the heavens. And NASA will do this transparently,” said Nelson.

Nicola Fox, associate administrator for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, added that the new director will act as a central point to combine communications, resources and data analysis capabilities in the United States government’s attempts to identify and understand UAP.

Getting high-quality UFO data

One of the biggest takeaways from the study was there is a need for the destigmatisation of UAPs. The space agency will now begin encouraging the public at large and both military and civilian pilots to report any instances of UAP.

“There are numerous eyewitness accounts but they are not consistent, not detailed. The language of scientists is data. And data points to a scientific conclusion to what the nature and origin of UAP could be,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for the NASA Science Mission Directorate.

By encouraging more of the public to report instances of UAP, the independent study group believes that the search for UFOs will have a lot more data to work with. This could also include a crowdsourcing effort, possibly using smartphone apps to ensure more “eyes and ears” on the ground.

“We know there is missing data due to stigma,” added Fox.

Using NASA resources to find UFOs

Some of the other recommendations include using NASA’s Earth and space-observing satellites to help understand UAP. Even though most of NASA’s Earth-observing satellites do not have the spatial resolution needed to detect relatively small objects like UAP, their high-tech sensors can be used to directly probe the state of the earth, oceanic and atmospheric conditions that are near UAPs detected with other methods, according to the report.

Data analysis to reveal UFOs

“Most UAP events lack quality in data. One of NASA’s contributions will be to bring together methodologies and to create datasets that are both reliable and extensive. Once we have a symbolic sample, artificial intelligence and machine learning tools will likely prove helpful in identifying anomalies,” said David Spergel, president, Simons Foundation and chair of NASA’s UAP independent study team. Spergel also emphasised that the study so far has no evidence to suggest that UAP are extraterrestrial in origin.

Spergel likened efforts to identify and study UAP to looking for a needle in the haystack. “First, we must understand what hay looks like,” he said. UAP research methods will first work to eliminate conventional events in the data.

AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office), an office within the United States Office of the Secretary of Defense that investigates unidentified flying objects, has in the past found that most UAPs are usually explainable as planes, balloons and other weather phenomena. Researchers will first work to remove these possibilities from the data before working on identifying the phenomena that are truly unexplainable before studying them further.

The need for studying UAPs

The distant possibility of finding extraterrestrial beings is only a small part of NASA’s motivation to study UAPs. Unidentified objects pose a direct threat to the United States’ national security as well as air safety.