NASA said in June that it will assemble a group to investigate “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UFOs while stating that it does not think they are “extraterrestrial in origin.” The space agency has now announced the formation of a 16-member team to look at “unclassified sightings and other data acquired from civilian government and commercial sectors.”
David Spergel, former director of astrophysics at Prince University, will preside over the panel. Anamaria Berea, a research affiliate at the SETI Institute in Mountainview, California; former NASA astronaut and test pilot Scott Kelly; and others ranging from oceanographers to astrophysicists to scientific journalists are also members.
The panel is distinct from a Pentagon panel looking at UAPs reported by military pilots and probed by US defense and intelligence agencies. After years of keeping such studies behind closed doors, the US government is now essentially conducting two tracks of UFO investigations.
Special effects professionals such as Corridor Crew, who are proficient at detecting phony and edited footage, are conspicuously missing. In a recent video, the organization refuted a number of well-known UFO films, including one from the Pentagon, attributing them to natural events such as a camera’s iris, a bird, and an infrared lens flare.
NASA does not seem to feel there is anything going on with these recordings and encounters. However, it said that even if no aliens are engaged, the panel may still play a significant role in selecting how to categorize them.
“Understanding the data we have around unexplained aerial phenomena is crucial to helping us form scientific conclusions about what’s going on in our sky,” NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said. “Data is the language of scientists, and it explains the incomprehensible.”
