NASA’s independent UFO study team is ready to share its findings.
The agency has commissioned a panel of experts in 2022 to examine data related to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), a new term for UFOs that now includes anomalous objects or events in the air, underwater or in space that cannot be immediately identified. Now the team will release its first report on Thursday (September 14), which will offer suggestions to NASA on how to better collect and analyze data that could help explain the nature and origins of UAP. The agency is quick to note that the report “is not a review or assessment of previous, unidentifiable observations,” according to a NASA researcher. rack announcement of the briefing.
NASA leaders, including agency administrator Bill Nelson, will join UAP Study Group Chairman David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation, to provide a briefing on the group’s first report at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) on Thursday. You can watch it live here on Space.com courtesy of the agency or on NASA TV.
Related: UFOs will remain mysterious without better data, NASA study team says
NASA’s 16-person UAP study team includes former astronaut Scott Kelly, a wide variety of scientific experts from academia, the space and aerospace industries, and a science journalist.
NASA’s independent UAP study team did just that one public meeting held as early as May 31. During that meeting, the group of experts largely discussed ways in which better data can be collected to help remove some of the mystery surrounding UAP. A common theme of the meeting was the need for more and better information. The current shortage of UAP data is caused in part by the fact that the capabilities of many of the advanced sensors operated by the U.S. government and military remain classified.
Despite the lack of definitive data, NASA’s Dan Evans emphasized at the May 31 meeting that studying a topic like UAP is within the agency’s scientific scope. “First and foremost, it gives us the opportunity to expand our understanding of the world around us,” said Evans. “This work is in our DNA.”
The topic of UAP/UFOs has been widely discussed within the federal government in recent years. In July, two former US military pilots provided testimony about encounters with bizarre objects that took place in controlled US airspace.
A third witness at the hearing, former Pentagon intelligence officer and U.S. Air Force veteran David Grusch, told the House Subcommittee on National Security on Border and Foreign Affairs that the U.S. government conceal existence of a “multi-decade program of UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering” and that “biological drugs accompanied some of these recoveries.”
When asked to clarify the identity of these “biological drugs,” Grusch clarified that he meant “non-human.”
These claims contradict Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the Pentagon’s new All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. told the United States Senate Armed Services Committee in April 2023 that his group “has thus far found no credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics.”
“The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO exhibit common features of balloons, [uncrewed] air systems, debris, natural phenomena or other easily explained sources,” Kirkpatrick told the committee.
