NASA Is Going To Study Those UAP/UFO Things
NASA to Discuss New Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Study Today, NASA
“NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT today – Thursday, June 9 – to discuss a new study team the agency is commissioning to examine unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs). The purpose of the study is to examine UAPs – observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena – from a scientific perspective.”
NASA to Set Up Independent Study on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, NASA
“NASA is commissioning a study team to start early in the fall to examine unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) – that is, observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena – from a scientific perspective. The study will focus on identifying available data, how best to collect future data, and how NASA can use that data to move the scientific understanding of UAPs forward.”
Well, that should be efficient, accurate and timely.
Led by two astrophysicists with no apparent aerospace background in understanding terrestrial aerial phenomena as detected by military aircraft systems. What could go wrong with that?
That is REALLY weird. The two astrophysicist mentioned are serious people that have worked on high priority science.
Most of these reports have already been debunked by applications of basic high school physics. So yes they are overqualified.
Ok, there are some VERY fishy things about this announcement.
(1) They explicitly state it is independent from the DoD effort. “Independent NASA study” is a phrase that carries maximum weight with the public.
(1) 9 months is a suspiciously very short duration in NASA time.
(1) Everyone named in the article is an astrophysicist. Serious high-ranking astrophysicists that only spend their time of the most interesting scientific mysteries. This is by far the weirdest part. These people are NOT specialist and NOT well connected with specialists in (1) aircraft (2) anything to do with earth’s atmosphere (3) earth observation from space. Their expertise in observations of space from space. Why the disconnect?
Not to mention that $100k is maybe enough to fund the leaders’ work time plus some grad students without relevant experience to do the detailed work. Not to fund contractors with experience in military aerial imagery interpretation. But these are serious folks who will somehow do serious work leveraged by their contacts. I only hope that they can keep their fellow astrophysicist Avi Loeb, “discoverer” of interstellar spacecraft such as ‘Oumuamua, out of it. The study cannot be completely independent of DoD since the naval aviation imagery belongs to DoD and is likely classified. First task would be to transition this imagery plus accompanying descriptive metadata to a NASA-accessible data archive environment, eventually for public access to support the final analysis. At that point the $100k is already long long past spent.
Ping Dr. Z on Twitter and ask. He’s extremely forthcoming there.
At last.
One can only imagine how many new UAP reports will arise from Starships flying in formation for refueling ops.
Will they try to contact the Klingon foreign ministry to get some input from them? For $100K NASA ought to be able to either purchase more file cabinets or maybe an external hard drive or two. Oh, well, this might be good PR for NASA.
UAPs/UFOs, is this really NASA’s mission?