A report from NASA on UFOs released Thursday found no evidence that unexplained sightings were extraterrestrial but admits scientists are not clear what caused them.
An independent group of 16 scientists and experts convened by NASA last year released its 36-page report on approximately 800 sightings from civilian and military personnel, including pictures.
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"The top takeaway from the study is that there is a lot more to learn," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a briefing on Thursday. "The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that [unidentified aerial phenomena] have an extraterrestrial origin. But we don't know what these UAP are."
The report, which relied on unclassified information, did not reveal any groundbreaking revelations that the congressional hearing over the summer asserted. A former intelligence officer claimed this summer that there was a secret government program, which spans decades, that retrieves and studies UFOs, but the Department of Defense has denied its existence. The report instead addressed what the federal government could do to collect future data on UFOs.
The report did note there is a smaller subset of the encounters that "cannot be immediately identified as known human-made or natural phenomena." But there is a high bar in determining whether something comes from outer space.
"In the search for life beyond Earth, extraterrestrial life itself must be the hypothesis of last resort — the answer we turn to only after ruling out all other possibilities," the report said. "As Sherlock Holmes said, 'Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.' To date, in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, there is no conclusive evidence suggesting an extraterrestrial origin for UAP. When it comes to UAP, the challenge we have is that the data needed to explain these anomalous sightings often do not exist."
The report comes as the government vows more transparency on the topic of UFOs. The space agency also announced it had selected an experienced person on Thursday to lead NASA's research on the sightings and UFOs but did not name the person.
“They are being tasked with developing and overseeing the implementation of NASA’s vision for UAP research,” Nelson said. “We will use NASA’s expertise to work with other agencies to analyze UAP.”
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Nelson said the space agency will work alongside other government offices to use artificial intelligence to “search the skies for anomalies," the results of which will be shared with the public.
Researchers also suggested that new systematic data-gathering techniques will need to be used in combination with AI and machine learning in order to further research on UFOs and encouraged the agency to observe local environmental conditions associated with UFOs to determine if there is any connection.