NASA announces team to track UFOs

The news on planet Earth isn’t super fun at the moment. For every great story about people protesting climate issues and Ketamine being effective at treating depression, there’s a lot of bad vibes out there too. Fortunately, we might be able to tap into some information that is out of this world soon enough.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (which you’ll know as NASA) has selected a 16-person team to “lay the groundwork for future study on the nature of UAPs for NASA and other organisations,” as a statement from NASA reads. A UAP is an unidentified aerial phenomena, which NASA defines as “events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or as known natural phenomena”, so in other words it’s basically an unidentifiable flying object (or a UFO!) which means… NASA now has an alien discovery squad!

The team includes world leading scientists, data and artificial intelligence practitioners, and aerospace safety experts. In the official statement from NASA, nine of the team use he/his pronouns, while seven are given she/her pronouns. The chair is David Spergel, a theoretical astrophysicist who has been cited in publications over 100,000 times, such is his influence in all things cosmological.

They will work together for nine months, and the job will mainly be going through unclassified data from a variety of sources that “could potentially be analysed to shed light on UAPs. It will then recommend a roadmap for potential UAP data analysis by the agency going forward,” says NASA. Today is their first day! The public will likely find out specific findings from the project when it is complete, around the summer of 2023. If you’re into it, all of the CIA’s information on UAPs has actually been online for a year or so now, and you can view a lot of the declassified information here.

And it seems that all this might just be one small step in our (or specifically, America’s) efforts to see if we can find any non-Earth dwelling pals out there in the universe. In July 2021 the Pentagon released a statement stating that they have started to track UAPs within the Department of Defense, and back in May, Congress held a hearing which considered setting up an investigation office to track all objects unidentified and flying too.

“Understanding the data we have surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena is critical to helping us draw scientific conclusions about what is happening in our skies,” says Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. And with such a team at hand, this might mark the beginning of us humans de-coding anything we possibly can about life beyond our atmosphere.