Things are looking up

NASA isn’t saying aliens exist. But it is saying, for the first time in almost half a century, that UFOs are worth paying attention to.

The space agency announced last month that a team led by a respected astrophysicist will examine what the government now prefers to call UAPs, or unidentified aerial phenomena — and along the way, what was once dismissed as conspiracy theorizing has earned the more impressive description of “high-risk, high-impact” research. This move will not come as a surprise to those who have followed the Defense Department’s own evolution on the subject: Senior Pentagon officials in May testified in a historic congressional hearing about their own efforts to track sightings of mysterious flying objects. And the director of national intelligence issued a report last year documenting more than 140 of these perplexing events.

The outcome of these probes so far has been deflating: The unidentified phenomena remain mostly unidentified.

NASA can try to answer national security questions, too, bringing scientific rigor to the project of analyzing available data as well as collecting new data. Part of the problem now is that those 140-some fuzzy images and videos offer scant fodder for confident conclusions.

The pursuit will obviously prove worthwhile if NASA or anyone else discovers that aliens do indeed exist. But it will also be worthwhile if — and this is much more likely — researchers land on another explanation for UAPs, and even if they land on no explanation at all. As NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said in his speech announcing the initiative: “We have the tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That’s the very definition of what science is.”