NASA's new Unidentified Aerial Phenomena study - NBC News

This morning, the effort to uncover the mystery behind those UFO sightings is about to get some help from some serious space pros. NASA announcing it'll form a new and independent team to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena, UAPs. But instead of focusing on classified encounters with military jets, the agency plans to examine data they've already possibly captured and may even include recordings taken by civilians. Just last month, this video shot on an iPhone during an air show in Miami appears to show something shooting up out of the water with people swimming nearby. And I saw it and I was like, what in the, like, no way. NASA's review could even include videos like this possible sighting captured in Utah by a film crew in 2016. I don't think it's bird. I don't think it's a bug. I think it's exactly what a UFO stands for, unidentified flying object. Once the investigative team officially launches in the fall, they're hoping to cross-reference things like video with other data, like satellite images or low orbit observations made by the space agency. This is what we do at NASA. This is not our first rodeo. We discover and explore many, many things in ways that, frankly, at the beginning look almost like a miracle. And then as we go forward, it looks like something new we never would have guessed. It all comes just weeks after Congress held its first public UFO hearing in half a century following hundreds of unexplainable sightings by the military in restricted airspace. And while most of those are expected to remain classified, including at least 11 near misses with military jets, more everyday Americans baffled by what they've seen are now hoping NASA could soon provide more public answers. Do you have enough data to say what these could be? At this moment in time, we do not have enough data to really conclude. Does that mean that it's not extraterrestrial life? I'm a scientist. And if somebody asks me, is this extraterrestrial life? Frankly, at this moment in time, the simple answer is the right one, which is, I don't know. All right. So this is a big, big project. Gadi, how long do you think that research might take? Yeah, it's a lot of data and a pretty short turnaround time. They're hoping to have a report ready in about nine months. But before we get too excited, I got to tell you, the budget for this thing right now is only about $100,000. So definitely not Apollo mission level kind of money. We asked them about that. They said, well, this is more like a preliminary study to figure out how to do a bigger study. So baby steps, I guess.