UFOs? After years of avoiding any serious discussion about these things, NASA is dedicated to it.
The space agency announced yesterday that it would form a team dedicated to studying unidentified aerial phenomena “that cannot be identified as known planes or natural phenomena.” Starting this fall, the team will examine existing data on these objects and come up with new ways to collect future data. All the work, which NASA expects to take nine months, will be done from a “scientific perspective.”
This is the whole turn of events. Of course, there may have been an association in people’s minds between the space agency and unidentified flying objects: the term UFO has been synonymous with alien spacecraft since the day it was coined in the 1950s. and one of NASA’s missions is to find signs. of life beyond Earth. But today’s announcement marked the first time that NASA has entered so widely, and significantly, into the broader discussion of UFOs in the agency’s 64-year history. Not only has NASA changed its focus on reports of mysterious sightings in the sky, but it will create a UFO research team led by a respected astrophysicist and hold public meetings on its findings.
“We have the tools and equipment that can help us improve our understanding of the unknown, and we’re ready to use these powerful scientific discovery tools in this case,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s scientific missions, told the press in a press. conference. “Unidentified phenomena in the atmosphere are of interest for many reasons. Frankly, I think there is a new science to discover. And there have been many times when something that seemed almost magical turned out to be a new scientific effect. “
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As NASA itself said today, there is still no evidence that UAPs (the government’s preferred term for “unidentified aerial phenomena”) have alien origins; the agency is much more interested in seeking life in the depths of the solar system and beyond. So why have such a formal interest now? For the same reason, it seems, U.S. lawmakers recently held the first congressional hearing on UAPs in 50 years: everyone talks about it. After The New York Times published a story in 2017 about a secret Pentagon program dedicated to cataloging UAPs, lawmakers called on the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. intelligence agencies in 2020 to report on all of their UAP data. The following summer, as the government prepared to publish this long-awaited report, a reporter asked NASA administrator Bill Nelson what the agency was doing about the UAPs. Nelson, a former senator who knew classified information, said he had spoken to pilots who had detected UAP and were convinced they had seen something that deserved an investigation. “So I talked to [Zurbuchen] on what we could do specifically from a scientific perspective, as well as an intellectual perspective, to try to shed some extra light on that, ”Nelson said in 2021.
What exactly is the “science perspective” or “new science” that NASA hopes to relax? David Spergel, the astrophysicist leading the new team, said in a statement that the group’s first task is to “collect the strongest data set we can,” including existing data from “civilians, governments, and nonprofits.” profit and business “. Zurbuchen, in a presentation today at the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, suggested that the group would also consider data from astronomy and Earth observation missions. “We’re looking at the sky all the time. We’re looking at the Earth all the time,” Zurbuchen said. “What kind of scientific data is currently being collected and archived by NASA or civilian government entities that should be set aside and analyzed?” And what new data should NASA gather to help understand the nature of UAPs?
NASA’s leadership is aware of how all this sounds. Zurbuchen said a dedicated research effort at the UAP poses a “reputational risk” to the agency. “Clearly, in a traditional scientific setting, talking about some of these issues can be considered selling or talking about things that are not real science,” Zurbuchen told reporters. “I just strongly oppose it.”
This is, in fact, unusual ground for NASA, an agency that has spent years trying to gently counter the claims that landings on the moon were falsified. A scientist working on a spacecraft currently orbiting the moon once told me that he carries images taken by the robotic mission of Apollo’s landing sites, in case he encounters an unbeliever. The agency also struggled to set the record after Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, said in a 2005 television interview that the Apollo 11 crew had seen unidentified objects on the moon. way to the moon. The raised eyebrows that followed almost reached the stratosphere. Some UFO believers thought that Aldrin had intentionally hidden this information. But NASA had discovered the mystery in 1969, and the culprit was no stranger: it was sunlight reflected from the panels of its spacecraft. NASA had never made these details public, which Aldrin did not notice.
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Surely the agency must understand that, even now, raising the issue of UAPs means stepping carefully between national security concerns and more, let’s say, creative theories. Unfortunately, NASA’s leadership is already on the safest path. Officials said today that the UAP’s new research work is not related to NASA’s programs to find extraterrestrial life beyond Earth, but spoke of the two efforts at the same time. Zurbuchen even opened the press conference talking about the very real ways in which NASA is looking for extraterrestrial life: a rover is currently looking for fossilized microbes buried on the surface of Mars. One NASA telescope is trying to discover new exoplanets, and another will soon look into its atmosphere, looking for molecules associated with life. The space agency plans to send a probe to a Jupiter moon with an entire ocean beneath its icy crust. NASA is even taken seriously in search of signs of technologically advanced civilizations. And when officials discuss UAPs along with their other alien life research programs, they are planting a seed in people’s minds. While they claim that there is no extraterrestrial explanation for UAPs, they give credibility to the claim that there is some connection.
NASA said today that in addition to the “scientific interest” surrounding UAPs, the agency is concerned about the safety of aircraft in our skies. Exactly: NASA’s first A means aeronautics, after all. But today’s announcement comes from NASA’s science department, not the aeronautics division, and so will funding for that effort. And the work will be directed by a Princeton theoretical astrophysicist whose interests, according to his academic biography, range from “the search for planets around nearby stars to the shape of the universe,” a much more ambitious dreamy than the safety of aircraft. At a very basic level, NASA must now take UFO claims seriously, and anyone with a new sighting to report will know.
The modern history of the UAP has been populated by many forces: lawmakers, defense officials, UFO activists, rock star Blink-182 Tom DeLonge. Now the cast includes the best space agency in the world and its arsenal of sophisticated space telescopes and probes. NASA officials said they would make all their findings available to anyone. No secrets! But that doesn’t mean NASA can control the public narrative surrounding this effort, or any discovery. Once NASA starts talking about UFOs, well, like it or not, it’s a completely different conversation.