WORK PRODUCTS: DISCUSSION
The panel's responses to the eight charge elements in the Terms of Reference, as well as the panel's overall recommendations and conclusions, all stemmed from a series of sub-panel reports that the entire team deliberated in full at the public meeting held on May 31, 2023. The reports are included in this section for full public transparency.
UAP in a Scientific Context
On June 9, 2022, NASA announced an independent study of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), with a focus on identifying how the Agency could address the question scientifically. Recently, many credible witnesses, often military aviators, have reported seeing objects they did not recognize over U.S. airspace. Most of these events have since been explained, but a small handful cannot be immediately identified as known humanmade or natural phenomena. These events are now collectively referred to as UAP. But are these objects real or are they sensor artifacts? Are they a threat to aerospace safety? Are they a threat to U.S. national security? Are they unknown natural phenomena? What else could they be?
This report outlines several approaches NASA could take if the Agency chooses to address the question of UAP.
A vital part of NASA's mission is to explore the unknown. Often, the most exciting aspect of exploration is discovering unexplained phenomena. After discovery, the next step in charting the unknown requires applying rigorous scientific approaches to understand an observation. This means scrutinizing our assumptions and intuition; transparently and diligently collecting data; reproducing results; seeking independent evaluation; and finally, reaching a scientific consensus about the nature of an occurrence. It was Thomas Jefferson who, in an 1808 letter, wrote: "A thousand phenomena present themselves daily which we cannot explain, but where facts are suggested, bearing no analogy with the laws of nature as yet known to us, their verity needs proofs proportioned to their difficulty."
Today, we summarize Jefferson's conclusion as "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." This is especially true when it comes to claims that could profoundly change how we view our place in the cosmos. Over millennia, we've developed ever more powerful instruments to study the universe and each time we've looked at the sky—or our planet—in a different way, we've observed surprising and perplexing phenomena that at first defied explanation.
For example, in 1967, astrophysics graduate student Jocelyn Bell-Burnell discovered a pulsing cosmic radio source. Its pulses were so regular—just like a ticking clock—that it at first seemed artificial in origin. But she eventually discovered that her confoundingly periodic cosmic object was a rapidly rotating neutron star: a pulsar. Today, scientists know of thousands of pulsars, and they can harness their clock-like rotation to probe everything from nuclear physics to gravitational waves produced by colliding supermassive black holes. In the 1960s, satellites also detected mysterious gamma-ray bursts. These initially looked like evidence for covert Cold War-era nuclear tests. Now, astronomers know that these tremendously energetic explosions are caused when massive stars cataclysmically collapse and die, and when stellar corpses violently collide.
Science has also solved mysteries that originated much closer to home, including the mechanisms behind bioluminescence and glittering atmospheric "sprites"—beautiful orange-red flashes of light that were reported for more than a hundred years but only scientifically explained recently. The crucial steps in understanding these events were the systematic collection of data, the rigorous testing of hypotheses, the development of new observational techniques to study unknowns, and an open and transparent scientific discussion.
The scientific method challenges us to solve problems by stringently evaluating our own ideas, by being willing to be wrong, and by following the data into unknown territory—wherever it may lead us. As Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, "science carries us toward an understanding of how the world is, rather than how we would wish it to be."
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