The US space agency’s announcement comes as the study of unidentified flying objects attracts increasing attention.
NASA has announced that it will launch a study of UFOs – a topic that has long fascinated the public – as part of a new impetus for high-risk science with great impact.
The United States Space Agency said Thursday that an independent team will study unidentified flying objects or unidentified air phenomena (UAP) with a focus on identifying available data, how to collect more data, and how NASA can analyze findings to improve scientific understanding. of observations.
The head of NASA’s scientific mission, Thomas Zurbuchen, acknowledged that the traditional scientific community could see NASA as a “kind of sell-off” by tackling the issue, but he strongly disagreed.
“We are not afraid of reputational risk,” Zurbuchen said during a webcast of the National Academy of Sciences. “Our strong belief is that the biggest challenge to these phenomena is that this is a poor data field.”
As NASA’s probes and rovers scan the solar system for fossils of ancient microbes, and its astronomers search for so-called “tech signatures” on distant planets for signs of intelligent civilizations, this is the first time the agency will investigate unexplained phenomena in the Earth’s sky. .
“Over the decades, NASA has responded to the call to solve some of the most puzzling mysteries we know, and that’s no different,” Daniel Evans, a NASA scientist responsible for coordinating the study, told reporters.
The announcement comes as the field of UFO research, once a poorly researched research subtlety, is gaining in popularity.
Congress held a public hearing on UFOs last month, while a U.S. intelligence report last year cataloged 144 observations it said could not be explained. This does not exclude extraterrestrial origins.
The NASA study will be independent of the Pentagon’s airspace identification and management synchronization team, but the space agency “is widely coordinated in government on how to apply the tools of science,” the statement said.
The study will last nine months, at a cost of no more than $ 100,000. It will be fully open without the use of classified military data.
NASA has said the team will be led by astrophysicist David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation for Advances in Research. Speeling told a news conference that the only bias in the study was that there would likely be many explanations for the UAP.
“We need to approach all these issues with a sense of humility,” Spergel said. “I spent most of my career as a cosmologist. I can tell you that we do not know what makes up 95 percent of the universe. So there are things we don’t understand. “
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