April 19, 2024

Solid State Lighting Design

Find latest world news and headlines today based on politics, crime, entertainment, sports, lifestyle, technology and many more

NASA joins the search for UFOs

NASA joins the search for UFOs
Placeholder while loading article actions

A senior space agency official said Thursday that NASA is joining the search for unidentified flying objects, forming a team that will examine “observations of events that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena.”

During a speech to the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, Thomas Zurbuchen, chief of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said the space agency will provide a scientific perspective on efforts already underway by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to understand dozens of such scenes. , medicine. He said it’s “high-risk, high-impact” research that the space agency shouldn’t shy away from, even if it’s a controversial field of study.

The announcement comes a few weeks after the Historic Congressional Hearing Watching what the Department of Defense calls unidentified aerial phenomena, more commonly known as Unidentified Flying Objects, and A report released last year by the Director of National Intelligence who has cataloged more than 140 flying objects that officials have not been able to identify.

On May 17, Congress held a hearing on UAPs (Unspecified Weather Phenomena), otherwise known as UFOs. Here’s why. (Video: Monica Rodman, Sarah Hashmi/The Washington Post)

The Nine-page report However, the congressional hearing was lacking in detail and did not reach any definitive conclusions about what the flying objects were, many of which were spotted by naval pilots. Officials said they found no evidence that the objects were some kind of advanced space technology developed by China, Russia or other countries. There was also no evidence that they came from extraterrestrial sources.

The limited number of such observations makes it difficult to “draw scientific conclusions about the nature of such events,” NASA said in a statement. The agency said it was concerned not only with national security but also with aviation safety. She also said, “There is no evidence that the unused atmospheric programs were originally extraterrestrial.”

See also  Mars' frosty crater sparkles in new image of the red planet

However, NASA said it wants to apply scientific rigor to a troubling issue that has been proven for generations. The study of UAPs fits with the agency’s mission to search for signs of extraterrestrial life, from Studying water on Mars The agency said to explore the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

“NASA believes that the tools for scientific discovery are powerful and can be applied here as well,” Zurbuchen said in a statement. “We have the tools and the team that can help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That’s what science defines. That’s what we do.”

NASA’s efforts will be led by David Spiergel, president of Simmons Corporation in New York City and former chief of astrophysics at Princeton University, and Daniel Evans, associate deputy director for research in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA said the study will last about nine months and will be independent of the Pentagon’s efforts.

“There is potential national security and counterintelligence [impacts]It’s not what we do for a living. “We’re not going to get into that at NASA,” Zurbuchen said. But he said the agency is studying the atmosphere and aviation, and there is concern that “the airspace is increasingly crowded with many different types of air vehicles.”

The report by the Director of National Intelligence found that “some of the UAP appeared to be stationary in the winds high, moving upwind, maneuvering abruptly, or moving very quickly, with no apparent means of thrust,” the report found. “In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed the radio frequency (RF) energy associated with the UAP sighting.”

See also  Black hole lights up years after star was torn to shreds - 'We've never seen anything like this before'

In his testimony before the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Intelligence, and Counterproliferation last month, Ronald S. MoultrieThe Pentagon’s undersecretary for intelligence and security said the Pentagon is collecting eyewitness accounts of mysterious flying objects that appear to defy the laws of physics.

“We know our service members have experienced unknown weather phenomena,” he told the bipartisan committee. “We are committed to making an effort to identify their origins.”

In an interview with The Washington Post last year, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he saw the classified UAP report when he was serving in the Senate. He said: The hair on the back of my neck stood.