The study was ordered in 2022 and with its publication came an announcement of NASA’s new commitment to investigating UAP, formerly known officially as unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
According to the report, its goal was to provide NASA with insights on previous UAP incidents, together with the concrete data available on them, and provide recommendations on how to handle future incidents.
It recommended that NASA play a “prominent role” in assisting the federal government’s effort to understand UAPs “by leveraging its extensive expertise to contribute to a comprehensive, evidence-based approach that is rooted in the scientific method.”
The report also emphasized the importance of collecting information from civilians.
This included establishing official reporting from commercial pilots via changes to the Aviation Safety Reporting System and air traffic management systems and coordinating with the Federal Aviation Administration.
“The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin,” Mr. Nelson confirmed. “But we don’t know what these UAP are. The mission of NASA is to find out the unknown.”
Mr. Nelson also recognized UAP research as a matter of national security.
NASA is still evaluating the study’s findings and recommendations.
Mr. Nelson was joined by Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate; astrophysicist Daniel Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research; and theoretic astrophysicist David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation and chairman of the UAP Independent Study Team, in a panel at NASA headquarters in Washington.
The four-person panel discussed the agency’s new position on UAP and announced the appointment of a director of research.
Mr. Nelson, a former astronaut, said in his opening remarks that the director is “being tasked with developing and overseeing the implementation of NASA’s vision for UAP research.”
“We will use NASA’s expertise to work with other agencies to analyze UAP. We will use AI and machine learning to search the skies for anomalies as we have been searching the heavens and will continue to search the heavens for habitable ability, and NASA will do this transparently,” he said.
The new director will work with the Department of Defense (DOD) and other government entities—as well as the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office—to centralize communications, data collection, and evaluation, and establish “a robust database” for any future information, according to Ms. Fox.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will also play a role in their research.
The director’s identity, however, is currently being withheld for security reasons after participants in the independent study were reportedly harassed and threatened on social media for their participation in the project.
In order to improve their means of data collection, all four officials emphasized the need to “de-stigmatize” UAP reporting by transforming it into a data-backed science.
One of NASA’s new goals is to “shift the conversation about UAP from sensationalism to science,” Mr. Nelson said.
“The current approach to UAP data collection has led to a limited sample of events and limited data,” Mr. Spergel said. “Stigma has limited reporting by pilots, both civilian and military, so we know there’s missing data.”
He also admitted that most UAP events lack NASA’s required quality of data.
“One of NASA’s contributions to the broader governmental effort to bring these methodologies to create a data set is to bring these methodologies to create a data set that’s both reliable and extensive,” he said.
“Data is the critical lifeblood needed to advance scientific exploration,” Ms. Fox said. “The director of UAP Research is a pivotal addition to NASA’s team and will provide leadership, guidance, and operational coordination for the agency and the federal government to use as a pipeline to help identify the seemingly unidentifiable.”
Mr. Nelson also emphasized that NASA will uphold transparency with the public regarding its unclassified UAP findings in the future.
However, data and events marked as classified by other government agencies such as the DOD will remain so until such agency declassifies them.
