NASA says it will spend nine months studying UFOs

NASA wants to believe.

And maybe it will at the conclusion of the latest study the U.S. government’s space agency is conducting. NASA announced this week that it would start a nine-month study in the fall to research unidentified aerial phenomena (or UAPs), with a focus on figuring out how to collect data and use that data to further understand them going forward.

The study will be led by David Spergel, an astrophysicist who is also the president of the Simons Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to scientific research. NASA said it’s still putting together the rest of the research team, which NASA’s press release said will put an emphasis on figuring out which UAPs are natural in origin for air safety and national security. In other words, if you know that the mysterious sky phenomenon is just a quirk of nature, you might be able to plan around it so it doesn’t cause problems.

Of course, the real juice of this story would be the discovery of extraterrestrial life through the study of UAPs, but NASA’s announcement poured some cold water on that idea.

“There is no evidence UAPs are extra-terrestrial in origin,” NASA said.

That’s consistent with what NASA said last year about UAPs it couldn’t explain, but just because there’s no evidence now doesn’t mean there will never be evidence. At the time, NASA said it needed a “more sophisticated analysis” of UAPs with “additional investment,” so at least it got its wishes a year later.

Maybe NASA should add Tom DeLonge to the team for some additional perspective.