A panel of scientific experts commissioned by NASA to study “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” more widely known as UFOs, said Thursday that it found no evidence that any of the reported objects were extraterrestrial in origin.
The world’s premier space agency, which explores the heavens for evidence of potentially habitable planets far from Earth, is the latest government agency to devote significant time and attention to a question that has largely been the domain of hobbyists, amateur researchers and conspiracy theorists: Just what are the hundreds of objects that humans, including military and commercial airline pilots, have reported floating or zipping through the skies?
Many believers in extraterrestrials will no doubt be disappointed.
“It is increasingly clear that the majority of UAP observations can be attributed to known phenomena or occurrences,” NASA’s 16-member expert panel wrote in its report.
But the panel also concluded that the ability to study UAPs “is hampered by poor data collection and a lack of uniform standards, which must be remedied if research is to proceed on a credible basis.”
“The top takeaway of the study is that there’s a lot more to learn,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in remarks at the agency’s headquarters in Washington.
While there was no evidence that the objects were not of this Earth, Nelson said he is keeping an open mind and following science toward a potential conclusion, and that he personally believes that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the vastness of the universe.
While the panel’s report was short on findings, it represents NASA’s first steps into serious UAP research amid a new era of openness by the U.S. government, particularly the military and intelligence community, which have been concerned that a growing number of sightings of strange objects may pose a threat to commercial aviation and U.S. national security.
The experts did not come up entirely empty-handed. “Most events” they studied, said David Spergel, the chair of NASA’s UAP independent study team, could be identified as “planes, balloons, drones, weather phenomena and instrument features.”
Those findings are in keeping with conclusions by the intelligence community, which studied more than 100 UAP sightings and found that most had quotidian explanations. Some objects that once befuddled experts have now been identified as spy drones deployed by China or mere optical illusions. Only a small handful of studied sightings remain truly unexplained, officials have said.
The Defense Department is also spearheading a governmentwide effort to analyze UAP sightings. After an examination of more than 800 sightings based on information collected over nearly three decades, the department has reported that only 2% to 5% could be described as “anomalous,” or unexplained. Its work is separate from NASA’s and includes additional classified information.
NASA’s efforts to bring scientific rigor to a historically undisciplined field are unlikely to quell speculation that the U.S. government is hiding information about the existence of extraterrestrial life. Recently, a former U.S. intelligence analyst, David Grusch, alleged in congressional testimony that for decades the government has run a classified program that retrieves alien spacecraft and even bodies. And in Mexico City this week, a self-described “ufologist” displayed for lawmakers what he claimed were two alien corpses discovered in Peru in 2017, alleged to be about 1,000 years old.
Reporters queried NASA officials on both those sets of claims Thursday. Nelson noted that Grusch’s account was, by his own description, secondhand. Referring to the alleged alien bodies displayed for Mexico’s Congress, Spergel said anyone who claims to have discovered evidence of extraterrestrial life ought to provide samples to the scientific community for analysis.
“There’s a lot of folklore out there,” Nelson said. “That’s why we entered the stage. … We, NASA, are trying to shift it from sensationalizing to science.”
To that end, the panel recommended that NASA “play a prominent role” in the broader government effort to understand UAPs, using “existing and planned Earth-observing assets to probe the local environmental conditions associated with UAP that are initially detected by other means.”
NASA’s key value, the experts said, is helping explain atmospheric and space-based phenomena occurring as the objects are sighted, rather than capturing data on the objects themselves. That’s largely the domain of the military and intelligence community, which operates sophisticated sensors and imaging technology, though much of the information collected in those domains is classified because of the sensitive tools used to gather it.
The panel also recommended that NASA explore enhanced collaboration with commercial satellite and imagery companies. And in a move likely to fuel the already intense public interest in the search for extraterrestrial life, the panel encouraged NASA to look into a “crowdsourcing system, such as open-source smartphone-based apps” to gather data from “citizen observers.”
The panel also called for new techniques, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to be brought to bear on the subject.
“We don’t know what these UAP are,” said Nelson, the NASA chief, “but we’re going to try to find out.”
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