NASA appoints director for UFO research

Reuters

NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 20:18

NASA has appointed a new head of UFO research. The space organization announced this after experts advocated in a report to detect more UFOs and collect more information about them.

The new director of UFO research will focus on data analysis to create a database for evaluating future UFOs, NASA reported. The director is from the existing UFO team, but NASA is withholding the name due to threats made against the team.

While the experts emphasized that there is “no reason to conclude” that the investigated sightings of objects are of extraterrestrial origin, they did say that mysterious flying objects pose a “self-evident” threat to US airspace.

NASA chief Bill Nelson also discussed in a press conference what he thinks about the existence of UFOs (unidentified flying objects) or UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena): “If you ask me whether I believe there is life in a universe that is so big that it is difficult to understand how big it is, then my personal answer is: ‘Yes,'” he said.

The US government has kept a low profile on this issue for years. That changed in 2021 when the Pentagon released a report on unexplained flying objects. This showed that only one of the 144 reports by army pilots was explainable. It is unclear what exactly is flying through the air.

A year later, NASA announced its own investigation. The American space agency acknowledged at the time that it is a charged subject, due to the association with extraterrestrial life, but stated that it was not afraid that the research would damage its own reputation.

Ufo of uap?

Uap therefore stands for ‘unidentified anomalous phenomena’, a collective name for objects that have been observed in the air, sea and space without it being clear what they are or where they come from.

The acronym stood for “unidentified aerial phenomena” until December 2022, when the Pentagon updated its terminology to include sea and space. NASA and other agencies followed suit soon after.

Although the abbreviation UAP is not new, it has only come into general use among US agencies after the Pentagon established the so-called ‘UAP Task Force’ in 2020. The term UFO has fallen out of favor because it still carried an association of conspiratorial and paranoid thinking. Pilots are also said to be reluctant to share their own observations, for fear of a negative impact on their career or reputation.

“NASA’s independent research team has not found any evidence that UAPs have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don’t know what they are,” Nelson said. He said a goal of NASA is to “shift the conversation about UAPs from sensationalism to science.”

The new NASA report calls UAPs, or UFOs, “one of our planet’s greatest mysteries.” “Observations of objects in our skies that cannot be identified as balloons, airplanes or known natural phenomena have been made worldwide, but there are only limited high-quality observations. The nature of science is to explore the unknown, and data is the language that scientists use to discover the secrets of our universe,” the report said.

According to the space agency, many reports and images of UFOs are available, but there is a lack of consistent, detailed observations, which means that definitive scientific conclusions about UFOs cannot be drawn at this time.

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