A new NASA report shows how to study certain types of alien lifeform
The Scientific Impact of UAPs on Planets and Moons: A Report on the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life in the Solar System
The associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, who calls UAP “one of our planet’s greatest mysteries,” notes that the language of scientists is data.
“We want to shift the conversation about UAPs from sensationalism to science,” says NASA administrator Bill Nelson, a former senator from Florida who once flew in the space shuttle Columbia.
Nelson insisted that the NASA independent study team didn’t find evidence that UAP had an extraterrestrial origin, even though they do not know what these UAP are. The agency’s mission is to find out what isn’t known.
NASA has been looking for signs of life on other planets and moons in the solar system and beyond, but it hasn’t often thought about “little green men” closer to home.
The new report offers a roadmap for how NASA could contribute to this area of research, and officials embraced the idea, announcing that the agency had created a new position, a director for UAP research, to help guide and coordinate NASA’s efforts.
They declined to name the person appointed to that position, however. Dan Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s science mission directorate, said their unwillingness to reveal the name was partly to protect that person from being hassled by people with strong feelings about UFOs.
Evans says some of the threats and harassment against some of the panelists were beyond the pale. “That’s in part why we are not splashing the name of our new director out there.”
The NASA Abundance of Strangeness: A Reply to the Commission on Strangeness, Unidentified Airborne Phenomena and Other Concerns
The report claims that most of the reported sky seeings are mundane airborne objects like airplanes, drones and weather balloons.
For example, the new report notes that while NASA’s Earth-observing satellites can’t detect small objects, they could help establish whether certain environmental conditions tend to coincide with strange sightings.
The Department of Defense has created a special office to look into unexplained phenomena, and Congress is paying more attention to them. The Pentagon said there was no evidence to support the claim that officials had recovered alien “biologics” from crash sites.
The 16 researchers and other advisors who drafted recommendations for NASA were not asked to weigh in on the nature of previous unidentifiable observations but to tell the agency what kind of data was currently available.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory could look for objects beyond the atmosphere in a planned large-sky survey. And programs to look for near-Earth objects, such as potentially dangerous asteroids, collect a lot of information about phenomena close to the Earth’s atmosphere.
The report states that NASA lacks a system to collect civilian reports and that the agency can crowdsourced that data via mobile phones. The private company Enigma Labs launched a mobile app that allowed people to report unexplained phenomena, then analyze the data with software.
The panel said that NASA should look at the possibility of collecting public data and observing it using smartphone-based apps.
The advisors say that NASA has a record of openness and public trust that could benefit the study of U.S. flying saucers, and the agency can help destigmatize the reporting so that they can be studied more robustly.
UAPs are the name the government gives to unidentified flying objects. I think further investigations of the aliens seem like a good career path for scientists. But let’s be clear about what’s happening here: this is a government agency that’s noticed UFO boosters are in Congress, and it wants some damn funding.
Look, I don’t think we’re alone in the universe. I suspect that, at minimum, there’s probably plenty of bacteria on habitable planets. The question of whether there’s intelligent life is a trickier one, but I am a little skeptical because I’m not even sure we’ve got intelligent life on earth. I don’t think we can call them ufos, or UAPs, because we haven’t yet explained why the planet itself is weird.
One thing that has been sustained is that it is aliens. Conspiracy theories are being stonewalled. This tends to be used as evidence by the true believers that they just don’t want you to know. I think that when the Pentagon forms a task force to look into the matter of aliens, that is a corrective measure. Okay, we’ll look.” That’s part of what you see in NASA’s news release, too: “NASA will do this work transparently for the benefit of humanity,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a press release.
Most UAP (or whatever you want to call them) claims don’t have real data behind them. I am not saying that is a knock, Nelson said during the press conference. That is one of the challenges here. Some military pilots claim to have seen odd things while flying. I believe they did! I can’t tell you what they saw. Something else we haven’t figured out might be the mystery spy planes from some other country, weather balloons, or strange atmospheric phenomena.
Getting data takes funding, and the budget of NASA is decided by Congress. If Congress is into UFOs, then why shouldn’t NASA get some budget for that? Hats off to management for the decision that makes sense. Nelson wants to shift the discussion about aliens from sensationalism to science. And you know what science always needs more of? Money is what it is.
