NASA announced Thursday it is appointing a director research to study unidentified aerial phenomenon, also known as UFOs, following the recommendations of an independent panel of 16 researchers.
The administration commissioned an independent study to discover how NASA could contribute to the cross-governmental investigation into UAPs. While the agency is still assessing the report and its recommendations, NASA did announce Thursday it would move forward on appointing a UAP chief, though the administration is withholding the name of the individual to prevent harassment.
While the report, which used publicly available, unclassified data from both federal and civilian sources, called UAPs “one of our planet’s greatest mysteries” juicy, ground-breaking details are scare. From CBS News:
The report does not contain any bombshell claims akin to congressional testimony that made headlines over the summer, when a former intelligence officer alleged a decades-long government program to retrieve and reverse engineer UAP craft, which the Defense Department denied.
Instead, the NASA group focused on examining how the space agency can “contribute to a comprehensive, government-wide approach to collecting future data” about UAP incidents, as the report puts it.
“The top takeaway from the study is that there is a lot more to learn,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the briefing. “The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin. But we don’t know what these UAP are.”
NASA officials said that while its data and research will always be 100 percent open to the public, they are withholding the name of the new director so that the scientific process can proceed unimpeded.
“At NASA, it’s in our DNA to explore — and to ask why things are the way they are,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “NASA’s new Director of UAP Research will develop and oversee the implementation of NASA’s scientific vision for UAP research, including using NASA’s expertise to work with other agencies to analyze UAP and applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to search the skies for anomalies. NASA will do this work transparently for the benefit of humanity.”
This comes after nearly two years of disclosure from the federal government that UAPs are frequent and mysterious visitors to our skies, and we have no idea what they are. Congress held its first hearing on unidentified objects for the first time in 50 years just last year.
And to think, none of this might have happened without the guy from Blink-182.
Screenshot: WTHR/US NAVY/YouTube