UFOs are almost certainly not alien visitors zooming through Earth’s skies, but NASA is nonetheless funding a study that will look with an open mind at unexplained sightings.
Speaking Thursday to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said the study would seek to scientifically investigate what the federal government calls unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs.
The study, which will cost less than $100,000 and begin in the fall, “will focus on identifying available data, how best to collect future data, and how NASA can use this data to advance scientific understanding of UAPs.” help,” Dr. Zurbuchen said during a conference call on Thursday afternoon.
dr. Zurbuchen said examining UFO reports could be “high-risk, high-impact research,” potentially uncovering an entirely new scientific phenomenon — or potentially inventing nothing new or interesting at all.
For years, a military intelligence official named Luis Elizondo led a little-known group within the Pentagon called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The Pentagon has said the program was halted in 2012, but proponents of the program said work continued. In 2021, the Pentagon announced it would form a new task force to look into the matter after a Congress-mandated report found there was insufficient data for many observed incidents.
At a House subcommittee hearing last month, Pentagon officials testified to military reports of unexplained phenomena, including a reflective spherical object sped past a fighter jet. The officials said there was no evidence that these phenomena were extraterrestrial in nature.
NASA’s effort will be independent of that of the Pentagon and will be led by David Spergel, an astrophysicist who currently chairs the Simons Foundation in New York, which funds basic research in mathematics and science. NASA has not yet chosen the other scientists who will participate in the study.
The NASA study will also consider other explanations, such as natural phenomena or unknown advanced technology developed by Russia, China or other countries.
“Honestly, I think there’s new science to be discovered,” said Dr. Zurbuchen.
At the end of the nine-month study period, Dr. Zurbuchen no definitive answers. But he said the effort would help catalog the available data and ask what other data should be collected.
“It’s for a research program that we can then run,” he said.
While many scientists view UFO research as “not real science,” it’s important to address controversial questions, said Dr. Zurbuchen.
NASA now has a robust program in astrobiology — looking at life elsewhere in the solar system and galaxy — but doing almost no work on the possibility that intelligent civilizations share our universe.
The vacuum reflects decades of Congressional skepticism. In 1978, Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin presented one of his “Golden Fleece” awards to NASA’s modest SETI program, highlighting what he called a waste of taxpayers’ money. In 1992, NASA started a radio astronomy program to search for radio signals from alien civilizations, but Congress canceled that attempt the following year.
Since then, systematic searches for alien civilizations have been mostly privately funded efforts, such as those conducted by the SETI Institute in California and by Breakthrough Listen. That initiative at Berkeley SETI Research Center is being funded by Yuri Milner, a Russian-born billionaire technology investor living in the United States.
During the press conference, Dr. Zurbuchen on NASA research seeking to identify potential “technological features” – signs of a technological civilization – in astronomical observations. Such signs may include air pollution in the atmospheres of distant planets.
“We purposely included that in our research portfolio,” said Dr. Zurbuchen.
However, Seth Shostak, a SETI Institute astronomer, said he doubted NASA would spend millions of dollars on SETI again, given the cancellation of the last program in 1993.
“NASA has since stayed out of the SETI game simply because it feels it doesn’t have room in its budget for a program often seen as a metal duck in a shooting gallery,” said Dr. Shostak in an email.