NASA launched a new study into what the United States has dubbed “unidentified aerial phenomena,” known more commonly as UFOs, following a renewed public interest by the U.S. government in investigating the unidentified flying objects.
NASA said this weekend that 16 science experts would participate in the independent study into “observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or as known natural phenomena.” The study began Monday and will last nine months with the goal of laying the groundwork for future UFO study. NASA said the team “will identify how data gathered by civilian government entities, commercial data, and data from other sources can potentially be analyzed to shed light” on the unexplained phenomena. NASA’s study “will focus solely on unclassified data” with the team’s findings expected by mid-2023.
“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 the nation’s capital, said this weekend. “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.”
INTEL COMMUNITY SAYS UFOS REMAIN MOSTLY UNIDENTIFIED
Bill Nelson, who has served as President Joe Biden’s NASA administrator since May 2021, said in October 2021 he didn’t know for sure what some of the UFOs seen by Navy pilots are. He said, however, that “we hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology,” bringing up the topic of the search for alien life and the mystery of UFOs unprompted.
Nelson said that “I’ve talked to those pilots, and they know they saw something, and their radars locked onto it, and then all of a sudden, it was here,” as he looked down, “on the surface, and then, it’s there,” as he pointed up.
“And they don’t know what it is, and we don’t know what it is. We hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology. But it’s something. And so, this is a mission that we’re constantly looking — what, who is out there? Who are we? How did we get here? How did we become as we are? How did we develop? How did we civilize? And are those same conditions out there in a universe that has billions of other suns in billions of other galaxies — it’s so large I can’t conceive it,” he continued.
The NASA leader made those comments a few months after the U.S. intelligence community released some details on its efforts to understand UFOs.
A brief assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was released in June 2021, discussing 144 reports of UFOs originating from U.S. government sources between 2004 and 2021. Eighty of the UFOs were observed with multiple different sensors, and most reports described the UFOs as objects that interrupted preplanned military training or other military operations. The ODNI report said “a handful” of the UFOs “appear to demonstrate advanced technology” and “in 18 incidents, described in 21 reports, observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics.”
The intelligence community warned that “some UAP may be technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity.” The ODNI said that UFOs “would also represent a national security challenge if they are foreign adversary collection platforms or provide evidence a potential adversary has developed either a breakthrough or disruptive technology.” The possibility of UFOs being of extraterrestrial origin was not discussed.
In 2020, videos from the Navy were released through the Freedom of Information Act that showed UFOs moving at incredible speeds and performing impressive aerial maneuvers.
John Brennan, who served as CIA director under President Barack Obama, alluded to the existence of UFOs on a podcast in December 2020, saying that “some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand.”
John Ratcliffe, the former director of national intelligence under Presdient Donald Trump, also said in a June 2021 interview that UFOs exist, adding they appear to display technology the U.S. does not possess and lacks the ability to defend against.
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The Defense Department announced in August 2020 that it had approved the creation of an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and that the group will be led by the Navy under the “cognizance” of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.
The Pentagon then declared in November 2021 that, in collaboration with the U.S. intelligence community, the Defense Department was establishing the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group inside that office.
