(Washington) After months of work, an expert report recommended Thursday that NASA play “a leading role” in the study of UFOs in the future.
The American space agency announced last year the launch of an independent investigation into this delicate subject, led by a group of eminent scientists and aeronautics experts.
The report, released Thursday, recommends that NASA “play a leading role in a government effort to understand” these “unidentified anomalous phenomena.”
“The importance of detecting” these phenomena with “multiple and well-calibrated sensors is essential”, and NASA has great “expertise” in this area, which could be used as part of a “data collection campaign rigorous,” underlines the report.
NASA can, for example, observe whether certain meteorological phenomena coincide with the observation of these phenomena, he says.
He also recommends that the general public be more involved, with the development of a system to collect recordings taken for example with mobile phones.
The American space agency is due to hold a press conference on Thursday morning to present this work, in the presence of its boss, Bill Nelson, and David Spergel, astrophysicist responsible for chairing the investigation.
The purpose of the report was not to review events already observed one by one in an attempt to explain them, but to make recommendations on how to study them rigorously in the future.
Experts are working to replace the term UFO – “unidentified flying object” – with “unidentified anomalous phenomena”, in order to distance the subject from speculation about extraterrestrials visiting our planet.
NASA defines these phenomena as “the observation of events in the sky that cannot be scientifically identified as an aircraft or a known natural phenomenon.”
While recognizing the existence of such events and the need to take them seriously, NASA has repeated for a year that there is no proof that they have an extraterrestrial origin.
During a progress meeting in May, experts stressed the need to collect more data, in a much more rigorous manner than until now.
According to some experts, new physical phenomena could thus be discovered, which would explain certain phenomena.
American intelligence and the Pentagon have also looked into the issue, emphasizing that it concerns both national security and that of air traffic.