NASA has said it has named a new director of research into what the government calls “unidentified anomalous phenomenon,” or UAP.
| Photo Credit: AP

NASA on Thursday said it has named a new director of research into what the government calls “unidentified anomalous phenomenon,” or UAP, while the U.S. space agency’s chief said an expert panel that urged deeper fact-finding on the matter found no evidence of an extraterrestrial origin for these objects.

Administrator Bill Nelson made the announcement about the new research chief – without disclosing the person’s identity – after the independent panel of experts recommended in a new report that NASA increase its efforts to gather information on UAP and play a larger role in helping the Pentagon detect them.

UAP are better known to the public as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.

Nelson during a news conference also gave his personal opinion that life exists beyond Earth.

“There’s a global fascination with UAP. On my travels, one of the first questions I often get is about these sightings. And much of that fascination is due to the unknown nature of it,” Nelson said.

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“If you ask me do I believe there’s life in a universe that’s so vast that it’s hard for me to comprehend how big it is, my personal answer is, ‘Yes,'” Nelson added.

But Nelson said the chances that otherworldly beings have visited Earth are low.

The NASA panel, comprising experts in fields ranging from physics to astrobiology, was formed last year and held its first public meeting in June.

“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,” Nelson said, adding that a goal of the agency is to “shift the conversation about UAP from sensationalism to science.”

The U.S. government in the past few years has made several disclosures of information it has gathered regarding a subject that once was met by virtual official silence. It issued a watershed report in 2021 compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in conjunction with a Navy-led task force encompassing numerous observations – mostly from military personnel – of UAP.

“The mission of NASA is to find out the unknown,” Nelson said.

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“Whatever we find, we’re going to tell you,” Nelson added, promising transparency on any discoveries.

The new UAP research director will handle “centralized communications, resources and data analytical capabilities to establish a robust database for the evaluation of future UAP,” NASA said.

Nelson told Reuters he does not know the name of the new director. Dan Evans, a senior research official in NASA’s science unit and a member of the study team, said harassment that other panel members had received from the public during their work was “in part” why the new director’s identity was being kept secret.

‘A vital role’

“NASA has a variety of existing and planned Earth- and space-observing assets, together with an extensive archive of historic and current data sets, which should be directly leveraged to understand UAP,” the panel’s report said.

“Although NASA’s fleet of Earth-observing satellites typically lack the spatial resolution to detect relatively small objects such as UAP, their state-of-the-art sensors can be directly utilized to probe the state of the local earth, oceanic and atmospheric conditions that are spatially and temporally coincident with UAPs initially detected via other methods,” the report said.

NASA’s science chief Nicky Fox declined to say how much funding the agency would like to allocate toward the continued UAP-tracking effort.

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The 2021 government report included some UAP cases that previously came to light in the Pentagon’s release of video from naval aviators showing enigmatic aircraft off the U.S. East and West Coasts exhibiting speed and maneuverability exceeding known aviation technologies and lacking any visible means of propulsion or flight-control surfaces.

That report said defense and intelligence analysts lacked sufficient data to determine the nature of some of the objects, while some could possibly be explained as atmospheric phenomena, advanced aircraft from another country or innocuous objects such as weather balloons.

The new report called UAP “one of our planet’s greatest mysteries.”

“Observations of objects in our skies that cannot be identified as balloons, aircraft or natural known phenomena have been spotted worldwide, yet there are limited high-quality observations. The nature of science is to explore the unknown, and data is the language scientists use to discover our universe’s secrets,” the report stated.

“Despite numerous accounts and visuals, the absence of consistent, detailed and curated observations means we do not presently have the body of data needed to make definitive, scientific conclusions about UAP,” it added.

American space agency NASA gave a platform to an independent committee looking into the reported sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), in which the researchers said that they did not find any proof that aliens were responsible for the phenomenon. However, the agency also said that it cannot rule out that possibility. The 36-page report presented on Thursday offers no conclusive evidence about aliens but outlines how NASA will investigate the phenomenon (called UAPs or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) with improved technology and artificial intelligence.

Do aliens exist?

The report observes that “there is no reason to conclude that existing UAP reports have an extraterrestrial source”. However, the last page of the report adds that it is possible that the objects could have travelled through our solar system to get here. “If we recognise the plausibility of any of these, then we should recognise that all are at least plausible,” the report said not denying the possibility of “potential unknown alien technology operating in Earth’s atmosphere”.

What about previous UFO sightings?

The inquiry concluded that many sightings have been explained by planes, drones, balloons or meteorological circumstances in the past. A January report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the US revealed that most of the 510 UFO sightings were decidedly not aliens, “however scores of other strange sightings still have no official explanation”. It said that UAP still poses a threat even if they are not extraterrestrial advanced technology.

The report added that in order to reach a “definitive, scientific conclusion” about the origin of UFOs, NASA lacks sufficient high-quality evidence. However, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson still believes that there is life beyond Earth. “If you ask me, do I believe there’s life in a universe that is so vast that it’s hard for me to comprehend how big it is? My personal answer is yes. It would have to be a very advanced civilization (but) the distances is light years, hundreds of lights, billions of light years away.”

Limited Data

The study asserted that given the data limitations, the sightings of UFO’s “cannot be immediately identified as known human-made or natural phenomena.” Dr Nicola Fox, NASA’s Associate Administrator said that the agency “needs to find a rocky planet around a hospitable star that isn’t too violent, that is in just that right place that has signatures of water and signatures of carbon. So, the building blocks of life, and we continue to strive to do that.”

“The limitation on this data is that at any given time most of the Earth’s surface is not covered by commercial satellites at high resolution – for a particular UAP event, we will need to be fortunate to obtain high-resolution observations from space,” she said.

Appointment Of UFO Research Director

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that a new director for UAP research will be appointed by the organisation. However, the new executive’s identity has not yet been made public since they have been receiving online threats regarding their work. According to Dr Fox,  the new director will serve as a focal point for bringing together communications, resources and data analytic skills in the US government’s efforts to recognise and understand UAP.