NASA is setting a team to conduct a scientific study into the existence of “unidentified aerial phenomena” — popularly known as UFOs.
UAPs are things observed in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or be explained by natural phenomena. UFOs carry the implication that there’s a connection to alien spacecraft, so it’s usually avoided in this context. What NASA is doing is looking at what data is even out there.
“When you’re looking for life on Mars, you start with a hypothesis you want to test,” astrophysicist David Spergel, the study lead and president of the Simons Foundation, said in a news conference today. “This is a phenomenon we don’t understand and we want to collect more data on.”
