Washington DC, US
Reuters
NASA on Thursday said it has named a new director of research into what the government calls “unidentified anomalous phenomenon,” or UAP, while the US space agency’s chief said an expert panel that urged deeper fact-finding on the matter found no evidence of an extraterrestrial origin for these objects.
Administrator Bill Nelson made the announcement about the new research chief – without disclosing the person’s identity – after the independent panel of experts recommended in a new report that NASA increase its efforts to gather information on UAP and play a larger role in helping the Pentagon detect them.
Workers pressure wash the logo of NASA on the Vehicle Assembly Building before SpaceX will send two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station aboard its Falcon 9 rocket, at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, US, on 19th May, 2020. PICTURE: Reuters/Joe Skipper/File photo.
UAP are better known to the public as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.
Nelson during a news conference also gave his personal opinion that life exists beyond Earth.
“There’s a global fascination with UAP. On my travels, one of the first questions I often get is about these sightings. And much of that fascination is due to the unknown nature of it,” Nelson said.
“If you ask me do I believe there’s life in a universe that’s so vast that it’s hard for me to comprehend how big it is, my personal answer is, ‘Yes,'” Nelson added.
But Nelson said the chances that otherworldly beings have visited Earth are low.
The NASA panel, comprising experts in fields ranging from physics to astrobiology, was formed last year and held its first public meeting in June.
“The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don’t know what these UAP are,” Nelson said, adding that a goal of the agency is to “shift the conversation about UAP from sensationalism to science.”
The US Government in the past few years has made several disclosures of information it has gathered regarding a subject that once was met by virtual official silence. It issued a watershed report in 2021 compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in conjunction with a Navy-led task force encompassing numerous observations – mostly from military personnel – of UAP.
“The mission of NASA is to find out the unknown,” Nelson said.
“Whatever we find, we’re going to tell you,” Nelson added, promising transparency on any discoveries.
The new UAP research director will handle “centralized communications, resources and data analytical capabilities to establish a robust database for the evaluation of future UAP,” NASA said.
Nelson told Reuters he does not know the name of the new director. Dan Evans, a senior research official in NASA’s science unit and a member of the study team, said harassment that other panel members had received from the public during their work was “in part” why the new director’s identity was being kept secret.
“A vital role”
“NASA has a variety of existing and planned Earth- and space-observing assets, together with an extensive archive of historic and current data sets, which should be directly leveraged to understand UAP,” the panel’s report said.
“Although NASA’s fleet of Earth-observing satellites typically lack the spatial resolution to detect relatively small objects such as UAP, their state-of-the-art sensors can be directly utilized to probe the state of the local earth, oceanic and atmospheric conditions that are spatially and temporally coincident with UAPs initially detected via other methods,” the report said.
NASA’s science chief Nicky Fox declined to say how much funding the agency would like to allocate toward the continued UAP-tracking effort.
The 2021 government report included some UAP cases that previously came to light in the Pentagon’s release of video from naval aviators showing enigmatic aircraft off the US east and west coasts exhibiting speed and maneuverability exceeding known aviation technologies and lacking any visible means of propulsion or flight-control surfaces.
That report said defence and intelligence analysts lacked sufficient data to determine the nature of some of the objects, while some could possibly be explained as atmospheric phenomena, advanced aircraft from another country or innocuous objects such as weather balloons.
The new report called UAP “one of our planet’s greatest mysteries.”
“Observations of objects in our skies that cannot be identified as balloons, aircraft or natural known phenomena have been spotted worldwide, yet there are limited high-quality observations. The nature of science is to explore the unknown, and data is the language scientists use to discover our universe’s secrets,” the report stated.
“Despite numerous accounts and visuals, the absence of consistent, detailed and curated observations means we do not presently have the body of data needed to make definitive, scientific conclusions about UAP,” it added.
‘ALIEN BODIES’ PRESENTED IN MEXICAN CONGRESS PANNED AS ‘STUNT’
A UFO hearing in Mexico’s congress that featured the presentation of alleged remains of non-human beings faced swift international backlash on Thursday, with critics labeling it a “stunt,” and questions from officials in Peru, where the apparent specimens first emerged.
Mexican journalist and long-time UFO enthusiast Jaime Maussan showed politicians at the hearing on Tuesday two tiny “bodies” displayed in cases, with three fingers on each hand and elongated heads. He claimed they were found in Peru in 2017 and were not related to any life on Earth. Maussan has made similar controversial claims in the past.
The images from the congressional hearing, the first of its kind in Mexico, sparked international curiosity as well as substantial scorn.
Former US Navy pilot Ryan Graves, who also attended the hearing to share his personal experience with sightings of “unidentified anomalous phenomena”, or UAP, heaped criticism on the presentation.
“Yesterday’s demonstration was a huge step backwards for this issue,” Graves said on the X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter. “I am deeply disappointed by this unsubstantiated stunt.”
Graves participated in US Congressional hearings on UAP in July, when he said that airspace sightings of unexplained phenomena were “grossly under-reported”.
Maussan said in the presentation that the specimens were recovered near Peru’s ancient Nazca Lines and had been carbon-dated by Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM) and concluded to be about 1,000-years-old. He claimed they were not related to any species on Earth.
Similar such finds in the past have turned out to be the remains of mummified children.
Peru’s Culture Minister Leslie Urteaga said no scientific institution in the South American country had identified the remains as non-human and questioned how the specimens had left Peru.
“There is a criminal complaint from the Ministry of Culture against some people who had a relationship with these gentlemen,” Urteaga told journalists late on Wednesday in reference to Maussan and his associates.
“I am going to ask for information to see what has happened…about the removal of pre-Hispanic objects, because I understand they are part of pre-Hispanic bone remains,” she added.
Maussan, speaking to Reuters on Thursday, said his critics had yet to present evidence to counter his claims.
“What they want is to take away the force that this discovery has, but only with testimonies, with questioning and without a single piece of evidence,” Maussan said. “We have been doing investigations for years…they want to come here to investigate with just talk.”
UNAM, in a statement republished Wednesday which it first issued in 2017, said the work by its National Laboratory of Mass Spectrometry with Accelerators (LEMA) was only intended to determine the age of the samples. UNAM declined a request by Reuters to see the full study results or interview researchers who participated. It also declined to say how old its study had found the samples to be.
In a press conference on Thursday, NASA officials fielded questions about the Mexican presentation as they released their own report on recommendations for helping the Pentagon detect and examine UAP.
David Spergel, former head of Princeton University’s astrophysics department and chair of the report, said he did not know the nature of the samples but urged transparency.
“If you have something strange, make samples available to the world’s scientific community, and we’ll see what’s there,” he said.
– CASSANDRA GARRISON, Mexico City, Mexico/Reuters
