Science is a process that reveals reality rather than sculpts it—no matter how unsatisfying or confusing that reality might be.
That includes the question of whether UAP have an extraterrestrial origin. There is an intellectual continuum between hypothesizing that faraway extraterrestrial civilizations might produce detectable technologies, and looking for those technologies closer to home. But in the search for life beyond Earth, extraterrestrial life itself must be the hypothesis of last resort—the answer we turn to only after ruling out all other possibilities. As Sherlock Holmes said, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."
To date, in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, there is no conclusive evidence suggesting an extraterrestrial origin for UAP. When it comes to UAP, the challenge we have is that the data needed to explain these anomalous sightings often do not exist; this includes eyewitness reports, which on their own can be interesting and compelling, but aren't reproducible and usually lack the information needed to make any definitive conclusions about a phenomenon's provenance.
This report offers a vision of how NASA could contribute to understanding the phenomena and how the agency's approach might complement efforts by other federal entities. Congress has made the Department of Defense's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) the lead Federal organization for resolving these anomalies. With its emphasis on open scientific inquiry, NASA can complement AARO's work.
The following sections highlight the information provided to the panel, and our conclusions, over seven months of fact-finding.
What is NASA's Role?
NASA is a science-driven agency committed to exploring and understanding air and space. That mission includes tackling unknown phenomena, whether in the farthest reaches of the universe or closer to home, as well as here on Earth. For more than 60 years, the Agency has focused on astronomy, astrophysics and aeronautics; it also uses space-based assets to study our home world's aquatic, atmospheric, cryospheric, and terrestrial systems.
As a result of NASA's long and storied history of space (and space-based) research, the Agency has amassed a robust and rigorous scientific arsenal for investigating unexplained observations, which will be crucial for studying UAP. The Agency has a variety of existing and planned assets—plus a trove of historic and current data sets—that could be used to address the challenges of detecting and/or understanding UAP. NASA research also employs a wide range of observation and analytical methods, using calibrated sensors, advanced data analysis, modeling, and cutting-edge computational and data visualization tools. As such, NASA's missions, data, and technical expertise in science and engineering could help to investigate and understand reported UAP.
The panel considered how existing and/or planned NASA missions, data, experience, or studies might contribute to the understanding of UAP using global satellite and suborbital observations. Chiefly, NASA's scientific discoveries, results, and databases are public. Already, an extensive data archive from NASA satellites and foreign partner space agencies is openly available, ensuring transparency as well as the opportunity for citizen scientist participation.
In Earth science, NASA's core mission is to understand and protect our home planet. Passive radiometric Earth-observing missions, such as NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites, currently employ a range of sensors that collect information about Earth's land, ocean, atmosphere, and other components. These data sets could help to identify weather, ocean, and other environmental characteristics coincident with UAP observations. New Earth-observing missions, such as NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar), a partnership with the Indian Space Research Organization, will provide valuable radar data that could be helpful for examining UAP directly, in addition to their environmental context.
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