By: Emily Chu

During a presentation on Thursday, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, announced that NASA will be joining in the research and search on UFOs. The agency hopes to examine “observations of events that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena,” or what the government calls unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).

UAPs and the possibility of the existence of aliens have long perplexed the public and remained a controversial and largely-unacknowledged topic until now. Discussions of UAPs and other intelligent life forms have become more mainstream in the past few years, with intelligence agencies studying UAPs more seriously. The study of UAPs have recently gained much attention from Congress, as shown by the public hearing last month on UFOs. This new initiative from NASA may be the gateway to learning about other life forms and societies on places other than Earth.

The search of UFOs in NASA will be led by David Spergel, former chair of the astrophysics department at Princeton University, and as Daniel Evans, NASA’s assistant deputy associate administrator for research.

“Over the decades,” says Evans, “NASA has answered the call to tackle some of the most perplexing mysteries we know of, and this is no different.” The project is announced to be starting this fall and lasting around roughly nine months, estimated to cost around $100,000.

Similar efforts were made by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to make sense of UAPs. Those agencies created similar research groups, such as the Pentagon’s Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group. NASA’s research will be independent from these groups, but the space agency “has coordinated widely across the government regarding how to apply the tools of science,” NASA has said.

A June 2021 Pentagon report announced that there were 144 UAP sightings between November 2004 to March 2021, 18 of which have abnormal flight patterns. “Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion. In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings,” the report says.

From evidence of views from the 11th century to pilots sighting puzzling objects and lights in the sky during World War II, the history of the sightings of UAPs has been perplexing. But the history of these sightings of UAPs took a wild turn in June of 1947. Kenneth Arnold, an American businessman, reported having seen nine unknown aircrafts flying through the sky near Washington’s Mount Rainier. The terms “flying saucers” came from this event, after several newspaper articles described the UAPs in that way.

From 1947 to 1969, more than 12,000 UAP sightings were reported, some more clear-cut than others. These sightings were reported to Project Blue Book, a team whose main goal is to examine UFO incidents and whether they represent a threat to the American public.

Recent UFO sightings have confused the public even more, such as the NJ Turnpike UAP incident, where a so-called UFO shone a V-shaped light over the Arthur Kill Waterway, a tidal strait between Staten Island and NJ. Later, air traffic controllers said that no known aircraft have emitted the lights.

Even though there have been multiple sightings of UAPs in history, the credibility of these so-called UFOs remains uncertain. The limited number of available UAP sightings to examine makes it hard for the scientists to come to an agreement on the origins of UAPs. The goal of the NASA study is to gather data that could help answer this question.

“One of the things we tangentially hope to do as part of this study, simply by talking about it in the open, is to help to remove some of the stigma associated with it, and that will yield obviously, increased access to data, more reports, more sightings,” Evans said. While NASA has explored everywhere from the moon to Mars, this is the first time that NASA will be examining an uncertain and unexplained event in Earth’s atmosphere that seems to be defying the laws of physics.

Sources:

https://www.space.com/ufos-uap-history-sightings-mysteries

https://www.livescience.com/pentagon-releases-ufo-report.html

https://www.livescience.com/nasa-begins-ufo-hunt

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/09/nasa-ufo-uap-extraterrestrial-space/