For Americans desperate for even-more UFO information than the testimony from intelligence whistleblower David Grusch this week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has some good news. In a trip to Argentina on Thursday, NASA administrator Bill Nelson reiterated his agency’s commitment to delivering a report on unidentified foreign objects next month.
“I decided as the head of NASA, since there are so many suspicions about aliens, that I would appoint a committee of very distinguished scientists,” Nelson told reporters. “That committee is deliberating, and they will make their report publicly next month. Now I can tell you in the meantime, until you hear the report, and they will consider using our scientific sensors in space in trying to determine this phenomenon.”
The agency’s UFO panel includes 16 scientists and other space experts, like retired astronaut Scott Kelly. In June, NASA delivered its first public hearing on the matter. Not too much was new: They haven’t observed credible evidence of alien encounters and pilots often misdiagnose normal airborne objects (including Bart Simpson balloons) for off-world tech. But Nelson’s statement that NASA is employing its sensors in space may be a new frontier for UFO researchers: The run-ins that other government agencies have investigated was all collected within Earth’s atmosphere.
In an interview with the BBC, astrophysicist and NASA’s UFO panel chair David Spergel said that he hopes citizen science can come into play to help pin down the origin of the few UFO encounters that can’t be explained. “We’ve got three to four billion cell phones distributed around the planet, they take good pictures, and can record the local time, the GPS position, local magnetic fields, and gravitational fields,” he said. Together with government radar, he noted that “you can get multi-wavelength data and learn more about the properties of the object. And again, most of the time, as you get more data, it will turn out to be something conventional. But the exciting possibility is it [could be] something we don’t understand.”
