NASA Launches Real Study Into UFOs

NASA has spent more than 60 years flying UFOs
(https://bit.ly/3NM09nt). Every spacecraft that ever visited
the moon, landed on Mars, buzzed by Jupiter, orbited Saturn,
or reconnoitered Pluto would be a decidedly unidentified flying
object to any alien intelligence that might encounter it. There
may be no such intelligence beyond Earth in our solar system.
But in interstellar space? That’s another question. That’s why
the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes, which left the solar system
in 2012 and 2018 respectively, carry golden records on their
sides etched with coded sounds and pictures from Earth a message
in a bottle to any civilization that might one day encounter the
ships and want to learn more about the curious species that launched
them. UFOs—or UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena), as they’re
more decorously called today—have frequently been in the news
lately. As I reported, just last month, the House Intelligence
Committee’s Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and
Counterproliferation subcommittee conducted public hearings on
more than 140 sightings by military pilots over the past 20 years
of UAPs flying in all manner of inexplicable ways: bobbing, weaving,
hovering, diving, changing direction with head-snapping speed that
would produce potentially deadly g-forces to any living being or at
least any living human being—inside. “Look at that thing, dude!”
one pilot shouted in a declassified recording made during a 2015
sighting. “Oh my gosh. There’s a whole fleet of them. They’re going
against the wind! The wind’s 120 knots [135 mph] west!”
The Congressional hearing followed the release last year of a similar
Department of Defense study of UAPs, and both Congress and the
Pentagon came to the same conclusion, which was basically: beats me.
The objects could be natural phenomena misinterpreted by the pilots
and their equipment; they could be new technology developed by
Russia, China, or another high technology power; and yes, they could,
in theory at least, be extraterrestrial in origin. “UAPs are
unexplained, it’s true,” Congressman and committee chairman Andre
Carson (D., Ind.) said in his opening statement during the House
hearings. “But they are real.” Now, there’s a third government agency
getting involved in the effort to explain UAPs: NASA itself. As the
space agency announced this week, it’s launching its own
investigation, beginning in the fall, to get to the bottom of the UAP
mystery. The effort will be led by astrophysicist David Spergel,
former chair of the astrophysics department at Princeton University.
Budgeted at a bargain rate of just $100,000, the study will run for
nine months, analyze all available video data and first-hand accounts
amassed so far, and consult both military and civilian experts for
their analysis of the evidence. The space agency is open to any and
all interpretations of the data—though it is setting a high bar for at
least one. “There is no evidence,” NASA said in its release, “[that]
UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin.” But absence of evidence, of
course, is not evidence of absence, and NASA officials acknowledge
that anything is possible and that they will follow the findings,
wherever they might point. “NASA believes that the tools of
scientific discovery are powerful and apply here also,” associate
administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said in a statement. ”We have the
tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the
unknown. That’s the very definition of what science is. That’s what
we do.” That is indeed what NASA does—and it’s high time it brought
those skills to the UAP mystery. After six decades of building and
flying machines it can very much explain, the space agency will
at last turn its eye to ones the world can’t.