NASA’s UAP Report: A Disappointment
NASA released the final report on their UAP study, which proved to be underwhelming and disappointing.
Background
Since the closure of Project Blue Book in late 1969, the U.S. government has essentially dismissed UFOs/UAPs as either hoaxes, misidentifications of natural phenomena (e.g., the planet Venus), or confusion with man-made objects like weather balloons and aircraft.
In 2017, The New York Times broke the story (1, 2) that the U.S. military had been secretly studying UAPs. This revelation eventually led to Congress officially establishing the All-Domain Anomalous Resolution Office (AARO) in 2022.
NASA entered the UAP arena in June 2022, announcing it would form a UAP study team. On September 14, 2023, the team published its final report. This post covers that report (pdf).
The Good
NASA showed up to the UAP topic.
NASA identified Air Traffic Management (ATM) data as a source of systematic data collection.
NASA chose to continue to remain engaged, appointing Mark McInerney as director of UAP research.
The Bad
NASA's funding for this initiative was minimal, primarily aiming to identify existing data that could be used for UAP analysis. NASA lacks quality data for this purpose; its Earth-observing satellites lack the resolution to detect UAPs in the Earth's atmosphere. While the agency mentioned the potential usefulness of future sensors, like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, it provided no specifics.
Commercial satellites offer better resolution but have an almost zero chance of capturing anomalous phenomena due to limited coverage areas.
Despite NASA's expertise in handling large data sets, no systematic data collection exists for UAPs. The agency suggested crowdsourcing data from people's phones but offered no concrete plan.
In contrast, Harvard's independently funded Galileo Project is far more advanced than anything proposed in NASA's report.
The Ugly
NASA showed little to no interest in identifying, collecting, and analyzing what public data is available (e.g., see RAND Corp's analysis of publicly available data).
NASA's press conference was a disaster and exacerbated the stigmatization of the topic, contradicting the agency's stated goal of reducing the stigma associated with UAP reporting.
Major news media coverage of NASA's findings grossly misrepresented the scant information actually contained in the report.
The Strange
NASA had a strange desire to sprinkle in the phrase “whole-of-government” as often as possible in the document. Here are some quotes from the document with the phrase.
The authors’ strange interest in the phrase “whole-of-government”