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S2E1: NASA Panel Recommends Investigating UFOs

• Spacefare • Season 2 • Episode 1

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In September, 2023, the NASA UAP Independent Study Team released its report.  They recommended that NASA investigate UAP, and made detailed proposals about how NASA can generate scientific advances on this topic.

I found this report refreshingly rigorous. Some outlets covered it as a dismissal of the subject, but I read it as a roadmap to serious research.

NASA UAP page: https://science.nasa.gov/uap/

Cool astronomy plate study: https://www.universetoday.com/163820/in-1952-a-group-of-three-stars-vanished-astronomers-still-cant-find-them/

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Speaker 1:

What the UFO. I read the NASA UAP report and I'm going to tell you what's in it. It's 34 pages long ish, so I am going to save you some time by doing this. If you want the tippity top line takeaway, it's we should look into this and find out what's going on. And that's coming from a panel that NASA appointed of people, so it's not exactly like an internal report as far as I can tell, but it is commissioned by NASA for and about NASA. It's a panel of experts from various fields and their main takeaway, which is just shot through the entire report, is this is what it would look like if NASA were to investigate UAP, and that, as you may intuit, is a strong indication that NASA has not actually investigated UAP. So what this report isn't is a blow by blow of recent sightings, running down all the potential explanations. They do that for, I think, maybe only two sightings from the past 20 years. Only two sightings from the past 20 years, both in a debunking capacity, which is to say proposing an alternate explanation to non-human intelligence. One, I think, is an explanation that involves a distance miscalculation that could potentially mean that the go fast video was actually just a regular passenger jet that was being perceived as moving really fast because the pilots misread the distance between the object and the ocean. And uh, the other was similar, like a a mistaken impression of a human aircraft for something more miraculous. But they also at least note one unexplained UAP which is the orb in Iraq or Iran, I forget, and there's a picture of that. So I'm getting a little ahead of myself. But the big picture thrust is they describe what it would be like if NASA were to investigate UAP and the panel sort of strongly suggests that NASA should do this. So I'm going to take you through with a sort of like quick summary of the big picture and then I'm going to give you a bunch of quotes from the actual piece so you get an overall view of what's going on, and I'm going to give you a little context around the sides of those quotes.

Speaker 1:

So first we'll just begin at the beginning and do the opening of the report and the executive summary and then we'll go into a series of quotes. So it's called the NASA Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team Report. The NASA Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team Report. The front and back cover pics feature Earth as shot from Apollo 14, which was an unmanned mission. Maybe somebody was being kind of creative there and imagining that the perspective of UAP might be that of a drone flying over Earth and we're seeing Earth from above.

Speaker 1:

Throughout this report they have some cool imagery. But right after that, the very first page, is a picture of lightning. It's a red sprite, which is a rare form of lightning which went unexplained for a very long time but has now been explained by science. So there's a nice little sort of idea here that they're setting up at the beginning that exotic, unexplained phenomena can turn out to have natural, reasonable explanations once you apply sufficient rigorous science. I will say on the upside that this looks very cool. This is an extremely sweet picture of lightning. It's all super forky, it looks like something from a D&D manual. It's just like spider webby and crystally and it's apparently very rare. It doesn't appear in most thunderstorms but it does sometimes crop up and it went like 100 years with no explanation, I believe they say in this report. On the downside, it's kind of a bummer to start a report like this with a meteorological explanation, given that what we're talking about in the last 20 years really is not phenomena that could be reasonably misinterpreted visions of meteorological phenomena. So if you're familiar with David Fravor's Tic Tac experience, for example, there's no way that that experience had anything to do with meteorological stuff. It could not be a ball lightning type thing, it couldn't be a weird cloud, and the vast majority of UAP reports just don't sound anything like meteorological stuff. So it's a little bit weird to start the report with a picture of lightning, but I get what they were going for and I think they get points for being clever and points for it looking very cool.

Speaker 1:

The first sentence of the whole report is great. It goes like this quote the study of unidentified anomalous phenomena presents a unique scientific opportunity that demands a rigorous, evidence-based approach. Addressing this challenge will require new and robust data acquisition methods, advanced analysis techniques, a systematic reporting framework and reducing reporting stigma. So this happens throughout the report. They talk a lot about rigorous science and what's so refreshing about this is that it strongly implies the correct reality, which is that we have not been doing rigorous science on UAP with the subject probably assume that we have ongoing scientific inquiry into UFOs. We don't.

Speaker 1:

It's been more than half a century since America looked at UFOs with a meaningful scientific eye. The last time was the Condon Report which was released in 1968. So that's over 50 years since we did a scientific exploration of UFOs, uap and even this NASA report isn't really a scientific exploration. It's more like a series of recommendations for how we would explore scientifically this topic. And, spoiler alert, the answer is mostly sensors, lots and lots of sensors.

Speaker 1:

So where do they go from here? They say NASA is well positioned to help and that they could work within a framework of whole of government operations led by a ARO. Can we say politely, uh, by releasing their just terrible report to Congress which is riddled with errors, uh, and biased as heck and just off base for so many reasons that I don't have time to discuss it. So it's a little bit of a bummer that there's this recurring theme through the NASA report that they're going to report to arrow and work with arrow to get this unified vision of UFO reporting enacted across the government and get everybody on board. That sounds fanciful here in the present, where we're looking back on a UFO report from Arrow that was just really shoddy, and so shoddy as to sort of suggest that the powers that be in and around and probably especially above Aero don't want to look into the UFO problem and in general there's sort of an elephant in the room style tension between NASA and the Pentagon that they sort of mentioned a few times throughout this report and I'll get to some of those quotes a little bit later.

Speaker 1:

Okay, next up, nasa says they have satellites that probably couldn't see UAP on Earth but could return data about conditions in sighting locations, which is again a little bit silly because they're sort of pawing at this meteorological explanation like well, if you told us where the UAP was, we could like tell you what the atmospheric conditions were and we could like help rule out atmospheric uh impact or effects, uh, which scientific and definitely appreciate, appreciated, uh, but it's it. It kind of hints at again these like ideas that you could maybe explain ufos with some meteorological methods, which you couldn't. But really what they're trying to do and they say this sort of toward the end is rule out natural explanations. So the argument scientifically would go if you want to prove that UFOs are genuinely non-human and unnatural by Earth standards, then you have to rule out everything on earth and in order to do that you want to know everything you can about the atmospheric conditions or the earth conditions or water conditions or conditions in the cryosphere, which is a word I learned while reading this report. It's about ice and the very cold places.

Speaker 1:

They briefly discuss the idea of maybe looking for UFOs in Antarctica and they suggest this as a possibility because it's a quote low background environment, basically one where you wouldn't have a lot of competing phenomena to filter through to see what you're really looking at. Like, for example, we do gravitational waves to see what you're really looking at. Like, for example, we do gravitational waves, uh, we do do gravitational wave detection in these deep underground chambers and, uh, and I think maybe in space as well. There are, there are certain tests that you want to run for, kind of like various cosmic particles. I think that you can only do in places where other particles are getting filtered out. So that would be a low background environment.

Speaker 1:

But again, re Antarctica, it's not perfect because, as they mentioned in the report responsibly, the problem with that would be that they don't know if UAP go to Antarctica and they don't know what they are, so they don't know if geographically limiting their search would artificially remove UAP from the equation. Which is cool. Like throughout this report is very intellectually responsible, like it's really careful, uh, and it's, it is skeptical, but it's not skeptical in a bullshitty way, it's just really rigorous. So I I ended up liking it a lot. Even though it doesn't say there are aliens and we should go meet them. It's very careful and it's very pro-science and I found that refreshing.

Speaker 1:

So they say that the NASA satellites probably couldn't see UAP on Earth, but they do mention that a bunch of commercial satellites could potentially have the resolution that you would need to see UAP as in sub meter resolution or, you know, around a meter. The NASA can't resolve anything that finally currently, but commercial sensors could, and NASA is very good at interfacing with the commercial sector, which is something they point out. There's a nifty little section where they talk about how great NASA is at interfacing with everybody. They can work with the military, they work with the commercial sector, they work internationally, they're really good with the public. So there's a lot of back padding going on in this report but honestly, nasa's earned it. They're a pretty cool organization.

Speaker 1:

So then they start by assessing the current situation and they say that at present, analysis of UAP data is hampered by poor sensor calibration and lack of multiple measurements, the lack of sensor metadata and a lack of baseline data which makes a concerted effort to improve all aspects of these things vital. So that's great. They're laying out the problem. The current difficulty with the situation is that you get scattershot reporting. Most of it is just narrative, like people telling you what they saw. And then when you do get sensors, they're sensors from all sorts of different equipment. They don't usually have metadata like information about where they were positioned or how hot they were running or how high up they were or whatever. And so they talk a lot in this report about how to unify that kind of sensor input or how important it would be and how valuable it would be to unify sensor input, and they recommend that NASA help collect future data with multiple sensors and use AI to crawl through that data. But they point out that we need better data in the first place to use AI effectively, and then they say that NASA is well positioned to get that data.

Speaker 1:

They then go as far as floating the idea of crowdsourcing technology and they say that they could help develop or acquire an open source system that could potentially do this, and their vision here for this is you would have like one reporting platform that many people all over the world could have on their smartphones, but it would capture data in similar ways or exactly the same ways. So if you had multiple people, say, recording the Phoenix Lights, then you would be able to see exactly what was coming into all their phones from different locations, and that could be really, really useful. You could use them to triangulate, you could measure atmospheric conditions that way and you could empower an army of citizen scientists to gather data effectively. So then they say they could help Aero institute a national reporting system, which they point out that we don't currently have. In fact, they note that the current FAA policy Federal Aviation Administration, I believe policy is to tell people to report UFO sightings to their local authorities, which is worthless. So they nudge in this report the idea that we should maybe consider having a national reporting policy, and they say that NASA would be pretty well positioned to design such a reporting policy, because they would be able to institute the kind of data collection methods that would help us establish scientifically what is going on. Would help us establish scientifically what is going on.

Speaker 1:

They pat themselves on the back, as they do a lot for helping to reduce the stigma involved with this subject, which they say is currently leading to data attrition. This is a very fancy way of saying nobody is reporting this shit because they're scared. We'll loop around to that a little bit with a specific quote in a minute. And they say that they can help encourage transparent reporting, rigorous analysis and public engagement, and I think they're right about that. They also know that the Aviation Safety Reporting System, the ASRS, is a system that NASA administers for the FAA and it receives approximately 100,000 reports a year. It's unclear if this is mostly or even partly UAP, but if people are reporting things to the Aviation Safety Reporting System, probably some of those things are UAP, maybe some of them are birds, but anyway, they point out that this system is already running. I think it's been running for like 57 years or something. And, uh, although it was not designed for UAP collection, the panel points out that better harnessing it could lead to building a valuable database. So we already have kind of a tool that we could potentially apply to looking for UAP a little bit more broadly. And they build on this by saying that NASA could help build real-time analysis into air traffic management systems, which is apparently ATM for short. They recommend playing a role in whole of government response and they say they should decide whether that's a leading or supporting role on a case-by-case basis regarding various proposals that they've made. They then explain their methodology, which is that they did sub-panel reports and then got together and deliberated those in one macro panel and they end with some cool pics of Earth from the International Space Station during sunrise and the northern lights, and that's the executive summary feature of this whole thing. So that's like an overview of the report from 10,000 feet.

Speaker 1:

Now I'm going to dive into a series of quotes that I found compelling and that I've been sending to my friends to try to get them to accept that this is real. So first, that first sentence. Again, I think it bears repeating. It's really good. The study of UAP presents a unique scientific opportunity that demands a rigorous, evidence-based approach. Addressing this challenge will require new and robust data acquisition methods, advanced analysis techniques, a systematic reporting framework and reducing reporting stigma. So great, that's clear. That's really all we could ask for of the scientific community is just to investigate this rigorously and thoroughly. Okay, so I'm going to tick right along and only interrupt myself if something seems important.

Speaker 1:

The next quote I picked is unidentified anomalous phenomena are one of the planet's great mysteries Observations of objects in our skies that cannot be identified as balloons, aircraft or natural known phenomena have been spotted worldwide, yet there are limited high quality observations. True, I just I like that they called it one of the planet's great mysteries, because embracing the idea that this is important or a big deal at all is kind of weirdly hard to do in science, and you can almost feel in reading this text how difficult it was for them, like it's in the UFO community very obvious to say we should research this stuff. But in the scientific community to formally say we should research this stuff is kind of a big move. It's. It takes guts because the last thing that came out in 1968 was the Condon report and if you aren't familiar, the summary of that report by an incredibly biased lead researcher is basically a statement that we shouldn't investigate UFOs, that the report had clarified them to the point that they no longer needed investigation, which is wildly at odds with how the researchers felt about the actual report that they were building. But the person in charge wanted to dismiss this all. If you're a UFO person, you know that already. Okay, so NASA says they're one of our planet's great mysteries. Love that.

Speaker 1:

Then they say we do not presently have the body of data needed to make definitive scientific conclusions about UAP. That's super true, and the only thing I want to pair with that is that if you're familiar with the ENIC data and the history of sightings and the research that has been done around sort of what you could call squishier stuff, like the narrative world of UFO experiences, we have lots of evidence. We have so much evidence that it's very intuitive to come to the conclusion that we're probably being visited by non-human intelligence. But scientifically, just from a brass tacks point of view, we really don't have that kind of data that we need. We don't have the indisputable smoking gun that we would like, and so this report is all about how we could try to get that.

Speaker 1:

They say many credible witnesses, often aviators, have reported seeing objects they did not recognize over US airspace Obviously a given if you're into this. They say NASA's fleet of Earth-observing satellites collect the most data within the Earth system, yet they typically lack the spatial resolution to detect relatively small objects such as UAP. I think that's irrelevant, because people might assume that NASA sees all sorts of stuff around the planet, so they would obviously see aliens, but not necessarily. One potential exception would be things that are really, really big. I saw a floating video of a giant V that was allegedly shot from the ISS, but I have not verified whether that video is accurate or not, but people have described very large objects like the giant red cube or like a mile wide sort of pleasure cruiser looking thing, and that stuff should be visible from NASA satellites. But those things do not come up in this report. So maybe as far as NASA knows that stuff doesn't exist, or maybe any time it's been observed that has been immediately classified.

Speaker 1:

Purpose-built. Future sensors for UAP, they note, should be designed to adjust on millisecond timescales to aid better detection and in lockstep alert systems should detect and share transient information quickly and uniformly. And again, they also noted that many commercial sensors are sharp enough to detect small UAP. But they also also note that that would be very expensive. So standing up such a system would be feasible but difficult and you'd want to build it around areas where stuff gets seen a lot, or you'd want to build it in such a way that you could quickly deploy it to such areas, which would increase the expense. They don't say how much, but expensive. And if you're NASA and you say something's expensive, you're definitely talking about billions of dollars at least least Collection efforts from radio and optical astronomy that are designed for technosignature searches should be expanded from the Earth's atmosphere to the whole star system.

Speaker 1:

Love this idea. Really cool thing they mentioned a couple times is there's an intellectual continuum it's a phrase they use between the logic of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence via remote radio signals and technosignatures on exoplanets and the logic of doing that closer to home. If you believe that it's feasible that there might be a radio signal or a technosignature, then by extension you also should onboard the idea that it's plausible that you might find that stuff closer to home. Board the idea that it's plausible that you might find that stuff closer to home. We'll get a full quote about that at the end of this list. Stigma associated with UAP reporting very likely leads to data attrition at present, as I mentioned, and we'll get a longer quote about that in a second. Then they give us a good bit of sort of landmarking for what would convince them, what would be really good evidence, they say convincing evidence of verified anomalous acceleration and velocity would point toward potentially novel explanations for UAP. That's great. That's a good line in the sand to have. You want to have these benchmarks by which you can judge whether you're actually looking at something unusual or not.

Speaker 1:

Establishing a more robust and systematic framework and data depository for UAP reporting is essential. I strongly agree with this. We need a much better, more unified mechanism to internalize all these reports. At present, they say, surveillance instruments are not designed to detect anomalous objects and associated metadata are often absent. Nasa should begin by developing new concepts and ideas for air traffic management systems which enable these systems to assist in the effort to better understand UAP, which enable these systems to assist in the effort to better understand UAP. Turning around that cycle again, but still worth thinking about. They say we recommend that NASA play a prominent role in the whole of government effort to understand UAP by leveraging its extensive expertise to contribute to a comprehensive, evidence-based approach that is rooted in the scientific method.

Speaker 1:

Okay, it's starting to seem like repetitive here, right? This is the drum that they're beating. They're saying NASA, you could do this, you could help the government figure out what these things are. Here's the intellectual continuum idea. There is an intellectual continuum between hypothesizing that faraway extraterrestrial civilizations might produce detectable technologies and looking for those technologies closer to home. Really good point. So what they're trying to do. There is sort of de-stigmatize this idea of looking for aliens around Earth by referencing or appealing to existing programs like SETI or the programs that try to find molecules in the atmospheres of exoplanets that might suggest that life exists on those planets and going a little deeper into this stigma idea. This is a little bit long but I think it's important.

Speaker 1:

They go directly at it by saying NASA's public announcement of its UAP independent study team membership was met with interest and spurred both positive and negative feedback. At least one scientist serving on the study team membership was met with interest and spurred both positive and negative feedback. At least one scientist serving on the study team reported receiving negative parentheses, hate end parentheses, mail from colleagues due to their membership, negative parentheses, hate mail due to their membership. Others were ridiculed and criticized on social media. Study team members also noted first-hand knowledge of colleagues who were warned to stay away from research in areas like extraterrestrial technosignatures, which could damage their scientific credibility and promotion potential. These experiences further confirm negative stigma associated with studying unusual or unexplained phenomena.

Speaker 1:

Such criticism, either by detractors or proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, are anathema to the scientific method which NASA always has and will continue to promote in an objective and open-minded fashion, love this kind of gutsy, torch-waving, anti-stigma announcement. They're really saying back off, jer jerks. And it sounds from that paragraph like most of the harassment that they described getting at the panel where they discussed this was from skeptics, which sort of surprised me, because I I assumed that what they meant was that full-throated, like extraterrestrial hypothesis type people were yelling at them for not taking it seriously enough. But it kind of sounds like they were getting hate mail from inside the scientific house and it clearly really bothered them and I appreciate that it bothered them. So then, I appreciate that they mentioned that it bothered them, and I think that should also inform people's opinion about the status of the scientific work.

Speaker 1:

So one thing everybody should on board about the scientific consensus is that it's been over 50 years since we did any real science about this. So all living scientists are have spent almost all of their careers in an environment where there's been no high quality data to study, no good studies to reference about this. So like, of course, there's been no high quality data to study, no good studies to reference about this. So like, of course, there's not a consensus that the extraterrestrial hypothesis is reasonable because there hasn't been significant study of it. But another thing to onboard is that there's a serious stigma in this community and a lot of that goes back to the 1968 report that said we should stop studying this that a generation, multiple generations of scientists have onboarded that idea and deeply internalized it to the point that they discourage other scientists from researching this stuff at all, which is cuckoo bananas and kind of sad. And also that has happened to other similar wacky areas of science not string theory for some reason, and not dark energy, but exoplanets for one thing and techno signatures. Both of those have been areas with pretty significant stigma and scientists who were going into them 20 years ago, many of them were warned not to bother because it would waste their career. So I get this impression that the scientific community is like a little stuffy and a little nervous about funding and promotions and I guess that goes with their general nerdiness. But I appreciate the very positive nerdiness of this objective, open-minded scientific method vision that the panel lays out for NASA. Okay.

Speaker 1:

So new problem they mentioned that much of the data collected by military sensors or intelligent satellites are classified, often because of what the imagery could reveal about US technical capabilities or our adversaries and not because of what's actually in the images. While essential for security, these classified observations enhance the sense of mystery and conspiracy surrounding UAP and they present an obstacle to scientific inquiry. I don't know how I feel about the mystery enhancement riff there, but I do think they present a serious obstacle to scientific inquiry and I guess I'll save that for the end. But I'm a little worried about how the Pentagon-NASA connection might play out around this idea. One more really cool idea they throw out about potential science that somebody could do. You remember this idea of background limiting strategy. So they mentioned.

Speaker 1:

Another background limiting strategy would be to examine astronomical plates for satellites prior to 1959 when Sputnik, the first artificial satellite on Earth, launched. And awesomely, someone since the study, since the panel report, has actually done this fairly recently and she found mysterious vanishing lights on astronomical plates from 1952, happened to be the same week as the major UFO sightings in DC and elsewhere on the East coast, like Salem, massachusetts, I believe. The plate is July 19th of 1952. And that is smack dab in the middle of the UFO flap in Washington and uh, basically it's uh. I can put the image free somewhere or link it somewhere, but the, uh, the, the. It's a picture of the sky next to another picture of the sky and in one of them there are three additional stars, three big circular bright lights that then go away later that day. Just a bit mysterious, obviously it's. You know, it's aliens, not that mysterious. And again, that's pre-Sputnik. So there's no, you know, starlink explanation. There's no satellite of any kind that could potentially explain that at this time and I found that it was.

Speaker 1:

I found that cool because this is a proposed method that the NASA report suggests and then it's something that somebody actually went and did and she got her result, which is sort of stunning, and because NASA laid down that baseline, we should consider that result significant scientific evidence. Again, I will put a link to it because it's cool and you should check it out. They also mentioned that current, planned or existing NASA missions can widen their scope to include searching for extraterrestrial technosignatures in planetary atmospheres, on planetary surfaces or in near-Earth space. So that's cool. They're saying there's a bunch of stuff that we're already doing or that we have planned coming up that we could expand the scope of to search for UAP, and they note a couple times that in expanding that search, whether they found something or not, we would still learn things Like. They mentioned that we could search for technosignatures at the Lagrange point between Earth and the moon. And even if we didn't find any techno signatures like hiding alien spaceships we might find chunks of the moon that came off when it collided with earth a long time ago. We'd like we would learn stuff anyway. So I thought that was cool and, uh, I hope that that's what they're working on behind the scenes.

Speaker 1:

Okay, last paragraph of the entire report. They say at this point, there is no reason to conclude that existing UAP reports have an extraterrestrial source. However, if we acknowledge that as one possibility, then those objects must have traveled through our solar system to get here. Just as the galaxy does not stop at the outskirts of the solar system, the solar system also includes Earth and its environs. Thus there is an intellectual continuum between extrasolar technosignatures, solar system, seti and potential unknown alien technology operating in Earth's atmosphere. If we recognize the plausibility of any of these, then we should recognize that all are at least plausible.

Speaker 1:

Beautiful, lovely way to end and, sort of hilariously, a lot of the coverage of this report ran with the first sentence of that last paragraph, which says at this point, there was no reason to conclude that existing UAP reports have an extraterrestrial source. So some outlets use that as an excuse to make their headline NASA says there's no evidence of aliens, which, after 34 pages of saying here's what we would do to look for aliens, is radically missing the point. The only accurate headline for this report would have to be something like NASA proposes methods to identify UAP or to search for extraterrestrials around Earth. You could equally cheekily go with. Nasa says aliens might exist, and I think the BBC did something like that, like they, they they did a two-toned headline that says NASA says no evidence of aliens, but they're possible, something like that. Just that's not bad.

Speaker 1:

But the big picture takeaway of the report is not that there are or aren't aliens around earth. It's that we haven't looked into this with anywhere near the scientific rigor that we would like to definitively answer the question of what UAP are, and at some point in the weeds toward the end, they push their glasses up and explain the way science works. Is you want to falsify a hypothesis, right? So if you want to get to the idea that UAP are non-human technology, then you have to prove that they're not something else. And one really cool discussion that they have in this is about this idea of a needle in a haystack and they say if you want to find a needle in a haystack, you essentially you have to do one of two things you have to either describe what a needle looks like so well that you can run a program on the haystack and identify the needle, because you've described what a needle is like so you look for those characteristics and you find it. Or you have to describe a haystack so thoroughly that you can run through a haystack with an algorithm and find anything that isn't a haystack according to your definition.

Speaker 1:

So they spend a fair amount of time talking about how to scale the process of searching for UAP and it sounds like their vision is we need way better data with more carefully calibrated sensors that have metadata and are sort of uniform across platforms, and then we need to rigorously analyze that data, probably with some machine learning techniques that can sort through them to find the needles in the haystacks. And alongside that analysis we need really good descriptions of all the normal stuff that we need to separate out, and or we need just great descriptions of the weird stuff that we're looking for. So when I first heard all that, I didn't respond very well to it, I think at the time I thought you don't understand the situation. You're just like not onboarding people's stories. But now that I've sort of done the deep dive here, I think it's not about that from a scientific perspective. It's not that they're throwing cold water on people's experiences, which are valid. Obviously they're not blowing off experiencers or the highly qualified aeronautics professionals who have had direct encounters. They're just saying, from a scientific perspective, that those stories are not sufficient to prove for us beyond a reasonable doubt that we're looking at something extraordinary. And what makes it so heartwarming this report is that they go on to describe what would give them proof, what would deliver us scientific evidence, that UAP are non-human, and that's really exciting. It's a genuine good faith roadmap toward making that discovery, which will be very difficult. And so I guess that maybe leads me to one outro take that's a little sadder, which is that I sort of doubt any of this is going to happen. Honestly, it's really hard to imagine NASA's rigorous sort of open source approach, where they keep all their information in the public domain so that citizen scientists can access and make exciting discoveries about it, and the Pentagon's super secret classified approach where they keep all their data in locked files that we'll never see and they won't release them to the press or even acknowledge that they exist. So it is a little disheartening to read this report and say we'll see. Is it us or Arrow who should take the lead and we'll probably defer to the military. They don't explicitly say that, but you kind of get the idea that if the Pentagon told NASA you're going to have to back off on this, nasa probably would back off on this.

Speaker 1:

And then, secondarily, there's this problem of the money, which is not insignificant. They don't quote any numbers in here which would have been great, honestly, if they could have worked up a little estimate of the situation, so to speak. We're spending billions to go back to the moon. It's going to cost us close to $100 billion to do the Artemis program. If we could just do a billion dollars of research on UAP, I think that would probably be worth it, given that the potential reward is a complete over overall of our understanding of a place in the cosmos and the nature of reality. Totally worth it. We spend billions of dollars on the massive reactor at CERN. We spend billions of dollars on gravitational wave studies. I made that up. I don't know how much we spend on gravitational waves, but CERN is like a billion dollars a year and it was like $5 to $10 billion to build. So somewhere in the multi-hundred million dollar range is at least reasonable to find out that we're being visited by extraterrestrials.

Speaker 1:

I guess as a fun little bonus, I also pulled some quotes today from this event that was in 2021, by Avril Haines and Avi Loeb and a bunch of other people. The NASA chief, bill Nelson, was there, but I pulled these specific Avril Haines quotes that I thought you might find interesting. One is the bottom line is we don't understand everything we're seeing. Oh, also, I should say Avril Haines is the director of national intelligence in the Biden administration. She says we have to deepen our analysis in these areas. She says the main issues Congress and others have been concerned about are basically safety of flight concerns and counterintelligence issues, but of course there's always the question of is there something else that we simply do not understand that might come extraterrestrially? Then she says, in response to a very good question, that our tradecraft that's in parens. I'm sort of alighting the top of this quote. But she says quote doesn't mean that we are definitely going to be able to tell if we are being observed, which is sort of surprisingly candid and, I think, obviously true. And then she finally says we're going to have to wait for Bill Nelson's NASA science work to actually reveal some of these additional possibilities. And over to Bill to talk about this report, which then happened to coincide with NASA appointing their first director of UAP research. So fun places to go off of this.

Speaker 1:

You can look up the director of UAP research. It is a tiny Wikipedia page but he is a person. His name is Mark McKierney and he has been in this post for almost a year. He was appointed in September of 2023. So it seems to me like it's just about time for a progress report.

Speaker 1:

I sent NASA a little thing today about their website not having been updated since they put up this report. Obviously they're not going to listen to me. Since they put up this report, obviously they're not going to listen to me. But maybe, if enough of us said something like that, they might give us just some indication of where they've gone with these recommendations. This report made a ton of specific proposals about how NASA could engage with the UAP topic, and then they appointed a head of UAP research, so presumably he's been doing something for eight or nine months.

Speaker 1:

Maybe we should get a status update from Mark McKierney so we can hear whether they've moved forward in deciding whether to take the lead or play a supporting role in any of these UAP tasks going forward. Are they helping to stand up a national reporting hotline, for example, or are they helping with the air traffic management systems that they suggested developing? Have they thought any more about the open source protocol that they propose that we might all implement together, or that multiple UAP apps could potentially incorporate into their data collection? And have they thought at all about retrofitting or adjusting some of their existing satellites or upcoming tech to expand their search from whatever they were looking for to include the potential of non-human intelligence orbiting around Earth and watching us read reports about them? Thank you for watching the skis with me. This has been fun. I'll leave the report in the place. I hope you're having a great day. Bye.