Sept. 14 (UPI) — NASA plans to host a UFO media briefing Thursday morning on an independent study team’s findings on UAPs — unidentified anomalous phenomena.
The full report will be published ahead of the briefing scheduled for 10 a.m. EDT.
NASA said in a statement the report “aims to inform NASA on what possible data could be collected in the future to shed light on the nature and origin of UAP. The report is not a review or assessment of previous unidentifiable observations.”
“The UAP independent study team’s main focus for the report is to come up with a way in which to evaluate and study UAPs going forward by using data, technology and the tools of science,” NASA said.
The report is expected to offer suggestions to NASA on how to improve data collection and analysis that might help explain the origins UAPs.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson will co-chair the briefing, along with the study group chairman David Spergel.
NASA held a hearing in May on the results of a seven-month investigation into the UAPs, more commonly called UFOs.
University of Delaware astrophysicist Federica Bianco, one of 16 members of the independent study team, said then that NASA has a problem with data analysis and management when it comes to the UAPs.
She said that the scientific method requires UAP data that meet the standard.
“Their collection is inconsistent,” Bianco said.
At the May hearing, witnesses, including naval aviators, described UAP objects moving “at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion.”
Spergel chairs the independent study team that was commissioned by NASA in 2022. He is president of the Simons Foundation and founding director of its Flatiron Institute for Computational Astrophysics.
Other members of the independent study team include former astronaut Scott Kelly and Warren Randolph, deputy executive director of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Accident Investigation and Prevention for Aviation Safety department.
NASA said it doesn’t actively search for UAPs, but makes data collected through satellites and other means available to researchers.
The agency defines UAPs as “observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective.”
The independent study team’s report was commissioned to examine UAPs from a scientific perspective and to create a roadmap for how to use data and scientific tools to advance the understanding of UAPs.
