Key Points
WASHINGTON, Sept 14 (Reuters) - NASA on Thursday said it has named a new director of research into what the government calls "unidentified anomalous phenomenon," or UAP, while the U.S. space agency's chief said an expert panel that urged deeper fact-finding on the matter found no evidence of an extraterrestrial origin for these objects...
Administrator Bill Nelson made the announcement about the new research chief - without disclosing the person's identity - after the independent panel of experts recommended in a new report that NASA increase its efforts to gather information on UAP and play a larger role in helping the Pentagon detect them...
UAP are better known to the public as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs...
"The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don't know what these UAP are," Nelson said, adding that a goal of the agency is to "shift the conversation about UAP from sensationalism to science."..
"NASA has a variety of existing and planned Earth- and space-observing assets, together with an extensive archive of historic and current data sets, which should be directly leveraged to understand UAP," the panel's report said.. "Although NASA's fleet of Earth-observing satellites typically lack the spatial resolution to detect relatively small objects such as UAP, their state-of-the-art sensors can be directly utilized to probe the state of the local earth, oceanic and atmospheric conditions that are spatially and temporally coincident with UAPs initially detected via other methods," the report said.. NASA's science chief Nicky Fox declined to say how much funding the agency would like to allocate toward the continued UAP-tracking effort...
