NASA to figure out how to get data on unexplained objects in the sky

On Thursday, NASA announced it's going to start working on a report about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), which are more commonly referred to as UFOs. The goal of the report isn't intended to draw any conclusions about their identity (or identities); instead, its goal is to figure out what data NASA either already has or could gather that would help us understand what they are and subject them to scientific study, if possible.

Although lots of the interest in UFOs is anything but scientific, NASA is putting this initiative in its Science Mission Directorate, and Thomas Zurbuchen, the head of that directorate, took part in a press call announcing it. The "UAP" nomenclature used in the announcement is important from NASA's perspective, in that there's currently no indication that any of the unidentified things we've observed are flying in any sense—they could easily be optical illusions or natural phenomena.

Zurbuchen made it clear that NASA doesn't expect to have any answers to the question of the identity of UAPs when the report is released in a year or so. Instead, the goal of the effort is to figure out how, in Zurbuchen's words, to "take a field that is data-poor and make it into something that's data-rich." He noted that NASA performs a lot of observations of Earth's atmosphere in a variety of wavelengths, so it may potentially already have data that can help determine what's going on if we could identify how to pick out the right data. Alternatively, if the report identifies that new sensors are needed, then NASA is well-positioned to build and operate them.