NASA Starts Independent Study on UFOs With New Team

A UFO captured in declassified military footage. Department of Defense/Screenshot via The Epoch Times

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Monday began an independent study on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), colloquially referred to as unidentified flying objects (UFOs), with a new team of 16 people.

According to NASA, the study will focus solely on unclassified data.

The team of 16 will, over nine months, study how data on UAPs gathered by civilian government entities, commercial data, and data from other sources, can be analyzed.

“Exploring the unknown in space and the atmosphere is at the heart of who we are at NASA,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.

“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.”

By the end of the study, the team will recommend a roadmap for potential UAP analysis by the agency, thereby laying the groundwork for future study on UAPs for NASA and other organizations.

NASA says a full report of the team’s findings is expected for public release around mid-2023.

Daniel Evans, the assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, is orchestrating the study.

“NASA has brought together some of the world’s leading scientists, data and artificial intelligence practitioners, aerospace safety experts, all with a specific charge, which is to tell us how to apply the full focus of science and data to UAP,” Evans said. “The findings will be released to the public in conjunction with NASA’s principles of transparency, openness, and scientific integrity.”

The team of 16 come from both private and public sectors, and include a former astronaut, an oceanographer, an astrophysicist, a data science professor, and a computer programmer.

The team’s chair, David Spergel, is the president of the Simons Foundations, a private foundation that supports research in mathematics and science.

UFOs have gained renewed public attention after congressional lawmakers held the first public hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years. At the hearing on May 17, Scott Bray, deputy director of Naval Intelligence, showed lawmakers new footage of UFOs but said he didn’t have an explanation for the objects seen in the videos.

The hearing came after a nine-page report (pdf)—a preliminary assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released in June 2021—said the UAP Task Force identified 144 UFO sightings from 2004 to 2021 but could only explain one of them.

Bray said at the May hearing that since the release of that preliminary assessment, the UAP Task Force database “has now grown to contain approximately 400 reports.”