NASA Announces Its Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Research Team To Examine Mysterious Sightings

UFO

The team will announce their findings next year.

A 16-person team — including an astronaut, a space-treaty drafter, a boxer, and several astrobiologists — will soon begin its review of unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP) for NASA.

The space agency announced Friday the members of the team, who will labor over the course of nine months starting on Monday to analyze unclassified data on UAPs, peculiar sightings of objects behaving unlike anything we’re familiar with. But until the full report is released to the public in mid-2023, NASA says everything will be kept a secret.

UAPs get their classification due to their puzzling behavior in the sky, which doesn’t fit into the known behavior of aircraft or known natural phenomena. NASA will unpack the data to come up with a way to study the unknown.

NASA says their work will “lay the groundwork” for future UAP studies. This first phase is a brainstorm, to see how observations that civilian government entities and commercial data have gathered could be analyzed. And then, they’ll look at how future data can be collected.

NASA will hold a public meeting after the report is released to discuss the study’s findings, an event that curious onlookers might want to earmark.

The space agency says officials are excited to see what the team uncovers. “NASA is going in with an open mind,” the space agency writes in a Frequently Asked Questions webpage devoted to UAPs. “And we expect to find that explanations will apply to some events and different explanations will apply to others. We will not underestimate what the natural world contains, and we believe there is a lot to learn.”

Is it aliens? The short answer is, NASA doesn’t know. The space agency chooses to highlight its search for extraterrestrial life when it publishes new information about the new UAP study. But agency officials have also been candid about where the data stands. They explicitly stated back in June that, “there is no evidence UAPs are extra-terrestrial in origin.”

Daniel Evans, the assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, orchestrated the study.

The 16-member team includes: