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.

Washington:

NASA on Thursday officially joined the search for UFOs — but reflecting the stigma attached to the field, the US space agency kept secret for hours the identity of the person heading a new program tracking mystery flying objects.

The official’s appointment is the result of a year-long NASA fact-finding report into what it calls “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAP.

“At NASA, it’s in our DNA to explore — and to ask why things are the way they are,” agency chief Bill Nelson said.

An independent team of 16 researchers concluded in the report that the search for UAPs “demands a rigorous, evidence-based approach.”

NASA is well positioned to play a prominent role, thanks to its satellite capabilities and other technical assets. But the agency stressed in its report that any findings of possible extra-terrestrial origin “must be the hypothesis of last resort — the answer we turn to only after ruling out all other possibilities.”

“We want to shift the conversation about UAP from sensationalism to science,” Nelson said.

While initially withholding the program leader’s name, NASA ultimately relented Thursday evening, saying in an updated press release it had appointed Mark McInerney as director of UAP research.

In government positions since 1996, McInerney has served as NASA’s liaison to the Pentagon on UAP issues.

Even if NASA has long explored the heavens, hunting for the origin, identity and purpose of a growing number of unexplained flying objects over planet Earth is bringing unprecedented challenges.

Military and civilian pilots keep offering a multitude of reports on strange sightings. But decades of movies and sci-fi books about aliens mean the entire topic is mostly laughed off by the public as the territory of cranks.

That atmosphere explained the unusual decision by NASA to initially withhold the lead UAP official’s identity.

“We need to ensure that the scientific process and methods are free,” said Daniel Evans, who worked on NASA’s report leading to the announcement.

“Some of the threats and the harassment have been beyond the pale, quite frankly,” Evans said.

800 events

There have been more than 800 “events” collected over 27 years, of which two to five percent are thought to be possibly anomalous, the report’s authors said in May.

These are defined as “anything that is not readily understandable by the operator or the sensor,” or “something that is doing something weird,” said team member Nadia Drake.

The US government has begun taking UAP issues more seriously in recent years, in part due to concerns that they are related to foreign surveillance.

One example of a still-unexplained phenomenon was a flying metallic orb spotted by an MQ-9 drone at an undisclosed location in the Middle East. Footage of the UAP was shown to Congress in April.

NASA’s work, which relies on unclassified material, is separate from a parallel Pentagon investigation, though the two are coordinating on how to apply scientific tools and methods.

In July, a former US intelligence officer made headlines when he told a congressional committee he “absolutely” believes the government is in possession of unidentified anomalous phenomena — as well as remains of their alien operators.

“My testimony is based on information I’ve been given by individuals with a longstanding track record of legitimacy and service to this country — many of whom also shared compelling evidence in the form of photography, official documentation and classified oral testimony,” David Grusch told lawmakers.

Earlier this week, the alleged bodies of two “non-human” beings were presented during a congressional hearing in Mexico, generating a mixture of surprise, disbelief and ridicule on social media.

The purported mummified remains, which had a grayish color and a human-like body form, were brought by Jaime Maussan, a controversial Mexican journalist and researcher who reported finding them in Peru in 2017.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Mexico City:

Mexican lawmakers heard testimony that “we are not alone” in the universe and saw the alleged remains of non-human beings in an extraordinary hearing marking the Latin American country’s first congressional event on UFOs.

In the hearing on Tuesday on FANI, the Spanish acronym for what are usually now termed Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), politicians were shown two artifacts that Mexican journalist and long-time UFO enthusiast Jaime Maussan claimed were the corpses of extraterrestrials.

The specimens were not related to any life on Earth, Maussan said.

The two tiny “bodies,” displayed in cases, have three fingers on each hand and elongated heads. Maussan said they were recovered in Peru near the ancient Nazca Lines in 2017. He said that they were about 1,000 years old, analyzed through a carbon dating process by Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM).

Similar such finds in the past have turned out to be the remains of mummified children.

Maussan said it was the first time such evidence had been presented.

“I think there is a clear demonstration that we are dealing with non-human specimens that are not related to any other species in our world and that all possibilities are open for any scientific institution… to investigate it,” Maussan said.

“We are not alone,” he added.

Jose de Jesus Zalce Benitez, Director of the Scientific Institute for Health of the Mexican navy, said X-rays, 3-D reconstruction and DNA analysis had been carried out on the remains.

“I can affirm that these bodies have no relation to human beings,” he said.

UNAM on Thursday republished a statement first issued in 2017, saying the work by its National Laboratory of Mass Spectrometry with Accelerators (LEMA) was only intended to determine the age of the samples.

“In no case do we make conclusions about the origin of said samples,” the statement said.

Lawmakers also heard from former U.S. Navy pilot Ryan Graves, who has participated in U.S. Congressional hearings about his personal experience with UAP and the stigma around reporting such sightings.

Congressman Sergio Gutierrez, from President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s ruling Morena party, said he hoped the hearing would be the first of other similar events in Mexico.

“We are left with reflections, with concerns and with the path to continue talking about this,” Gutierrez said.

In recent years, the U.S. government has done an about-face on public information on UAP after decades of stonewalling and deflecting. The Pentagon has been actively investigating reported sightings in recent years by military aviators, while an independent NASA panel studying UFOs is the first of its kind by the space agency.

NASA is set to discuss findings from the study on Thursday.

Maussan faced swift backlash and criticism from skeptics on Wednesday who questioned the authenticity of his presentation.

“This could really hurt efforts to take the issue seriously,” said a user of X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter. “Why didn’t they wait until a scientific paper was ready to publish it?”

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)