The report by NASA’s Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team pushes for a bunch of critical changes in the system regarding how UAP sightings are analyzed, how the data is collected, and the ways multiple agencies can collaborate to build a database. “At this point, there is no reason to conclude that existing UAP reports have an extraterrestrial source,” the report says, adding that scientific thinking and hard data are what the whole endeavor needs.
A major problem with UAP reports is that such incidents are often captured with sensors that don’t yield enough data for a proper scientific analysis. The report even suggests developing open-source smartphone-based apps for gathering data from multiple smartphone sensors, contributed by volunteer citizen scientists worldwide. But the interest in UAPs doesn’t come solely out of mankind’s undying interest to explore and communicate with an extraterrestrial life form, a concept that has remained hypothetical so far.
There’s also a realistic national security aspect to consider here. “The threat to U.S. airspace safety posed by UAP is self-evident,” says NASA’s report. The core proposal is that NASA should collaborate not only with the Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), but also with aviation stakeholders, space agencies in other countries, science observatories across the world, and satellite system operators, among others to collect solid data. There are also calls for developing “purpose-built future sensors for UAP detection” and advanced techniques that rely on AI and machine learning to boost the efforts.