NASA called by expert report to play key role in UFO study

NASA presented this Thursday, September 14, an expert report devoted to unidentified flying objects, which recommends that the American space agency play in the future "a leading role" in the study of UFOs.

Logo of NASA, the American space agency. (Illustrative image) © John Raoux / AP

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Is there life outside the Earth? Still no answer to this nagging question, but NASA will provide a roadmap for future studies on unidentified phenomena. A team of sixteen scientists and aeronautics experts have been working for months on a report, mandated in 2022 and presented this Thursday, about UFOs. It draws its information from more than 800 reports of unidentified apparitions, as reported by the media Sky News. With this study, the agency complies with the injunctions of the US Congress, which has been demanding transparency for years.

The independent panel makes recommendations on how to study them more rigorously. Already, the connoted term "UFO", an unidentified flying object, will be replaced by "unidentified anomalous phenomena" which NASA defines as "the observation of events in the sky that cannot be scientifically identified as an aircraft or a known natural phenomenon".

In its report, the agency indicates how it can corroborate or deny reports of appearances in the sky, thanks to its "fleet of Earth-facing satellites and state-of-the-art sensors," which make it possible to probe whether certain environmental factors coincide with the occurrences of anomalous phenomena. NASA says it could coordinate its findings with the commercial satellite remote sensing industry. The scientists also reveal that artificial intelligence can be used to spot these phenomena, but should not rely solely on computer study.

« No evidence that UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin »

These unexplained sightings are regularly associated with the idea of an extraterrestrial life form, but in reality "there is no evidence that UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin," NASA has repeatedly recalled. During a step-by-step meeting last June, the experts expressed the importance of collecting as much data as possible on the subject and designing the best tools to analyze it.

The U.S. government is also taking reports of anomalous phenomena increasingly seriously, including concerns about espionage and surveillance from abroad. The Pentagon has been working on these kinds of files for a very long time, as part of a secret program, the "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program." It has received 350 reports regarding UFOs in the last two years. Most of this is air waste, Chinese spy devices or weather balloons.

" READ ALSO Unidentified flying objects, disinformation takes off

At a time when the United States is downgrading multiple images of elements perceived in the sky, the presence of "aliens" has aroused fascination and fantasies across the globe for years. A tragicomic conference held Tuesday in Mexico is an illustration of this. Specimens were presented to the Mexican Congress as "non-human bodies" with three fingers and an elongated head. In reality, these "alien corpses" would be only an assembly of mummified human remains.

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