Nasa is going ‘full force’ in hunt for UFOs

‘This is really important to us, and we’re placing a high priority on it’ the space agency said

Nasa is going “full force” into examining unidentified flying objects, the space agency said during a town hall meeting.

"This is really important to us, and we’re placing a high priority on it”, Daniel Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research at Nasa’s Science Mission Directorate said on Wednesday.

The commitment came after Nasa announced that it was conducting a nine-month study of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, following the the first hearings on the topic of UFOs/UAPs in decades.

Intelligence officials briefed lawmakers on an ongoing Pentagon investigation into UAPs, and showed video of unexplained UAP encounters with military aviators.

The study panel, made up of 15 to 17 people, will have a budget of up to $100,000 and will be entirely open – containing no classified military data.

David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation, will be leading the study in collaboration with "some of the world’s leading scientists, data practitioners, artificial intelligence practitioners, aerospace safety experts, all with a specific charge, which is to tell us how to apply the full focus of science and data to UAPs", according to Mr Evans.

"I’m hoping that we’ll get this done by October,” he added, “but I will cross my fingers and say that we could be able to get it done sooner than that.”

Nasa has a huge amount of data regarding the planet’s atmosphere that could be used to hunt UFOs. “We observe it both from above and below. Whether it’s air traffic management data, astronomers looking up, satellites looking down,” Dr Sperger said in July. “We want to start by synthesizing the data we have.”

In May, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray said that UFO sightings are “frequent and continuous,” adding that it was “clear that many of the sightings are physical objects, based on the data that we have.”

These sightings fall into one of five categories, he says: airborne clutter, national atmospheric phenomena, US industry development programs, foreign adversaries, or “other.” There have currently been 11 near-collisions between UFOs and military assets.