NASA’s UFO Study Isn’t Really Looking for Space Aliens

There were pictures and data that showed a curve of purple light in the sky, which was green underneath. He didn't give it a lot of thought. He puts it into a bucket that he understood.

He found himself at a bar with a group of amateur photographers. The members of the Aurora Chasers showed off their pictures. The attendee showed the man a shot of the purple arcs that had been seen over the years. Images of it look like something out of a science fiction movie.

While looking at the picture, he realized the lights lived in a bucket that he didn't know about. They didn't have a nickname. The phenomenon Steve was called after a group of animals gave to shrubbery they don't understand in a children's movie.

To understand the mechanism behind it and change an unknown into a known, Donovan and his colleagues collaborated with the Aurora chasers.

The thrust of the new NASA project is to study unexplained phenomena. In the space agency's efforts to learn more about unidentified things in Earth's atmosphere, the narrative of Steve could play out similarly.

NASA announced in June that it was starting a small study of unidentified aerial phenomena. Eight to 12 experts will work on the UAP Independent Study for almost a year on a $100,000 budget. Its goal is to identify data that has already been gathered, or that could be in the future, from NASA and other organizations to advance the scientific understanding of UAPs. The scientist leading the study, David Spergel, and NASA declined to comment on the story.

The huge volumes of data from NASA's vast network of past and present Earth-observation satellites could be a treasure trove for UAP research. It would be wrong to think that this could only affect searches for aliens. Scientists are more likely to discover new, exotic-but-earthly atmospheric phenomena than they are to find any credible evidence of extraterrestrial visitors if they use NASA data to flag anomalies.

After naming the phenomenon, Donovan and his colleagues hoped to pin down Steve by seeing it cross their data streams from satellites and atmospheric sensors.

They caught a break in July of 2016 when a panoramic camera caught Steve in action. He asked if anyone had seen it the night before. Someone sent him two pictures.

One of the European Space Agency's Swarm satellites had been flying over the right place at the right time, and its sensors caught a big temperature increase and a fast- moving gas flow where and when Steve appeared. Specific details of the phenomenon's revelation led to a new name. Steve was a backronym for "strong thermal emission velocity enhancement." It was one of the most dramatic days of the year.

It wasn't the only time when a scientist's attention to people's strange Sightings led to new Empirical Discoveries. There were airborne fireballs and a green sphere of light rolling on the ground. Stephen Hughes, a physicist at the University of Technology, was interested in the reports on the odd observations.

Hughes was fascinated by the stories from that night. Based on that anecdotal information, he was able to find a similar historical occurrence, along with measurements taken on the night that it happened. There's a chance that green fireballs and ball lightning are related. He theorizes that the trail of particles from the meteorites could cause an electrical connection between the atmosphere and the ground.

Scientists can use the power of everyday people looking at the sky to learn more about other atmospheric phenomena, such as red sprites and hole-punch clouds. Despite all our modern-day sky watching, air travel and globe-girdling networks of Earth-observing satellites and ground-based instruments, scientists' catalog of atmospheric phenomena are nowhere near complete.

"I don't believe we'll ever run out of things to discover." There is a problem with research culture as a whole. He says that they aren't in discovery mode.

Scientists need to explain their research plan in order to win grants. They often already know a lot about their object of study and only try to make small, incremental advances in knowledge. The big thing is not discovery.

Maybe, with a line of research pointing at the unnamed, that could change.

The historical output of the research hasn't been good. Consider the sobering conclusion reached by Edward Condon of the University of Colorado Boulder in a 1960s government funded study of unexplained flying objects. There has been no added to scientific knowledge from the study of unexplained flying objects. In the expectation that science will be advanced, there is no justification for further study of ufls.

Greg Eghigian, a historian at the Pennsylvania State University, can't think of a time when studying them led to major changes in the physical sciences. He says that academic interest in unexplained phenomena has led to more tangible progress in the social sciences and humanities, where reports of unexplained phenomena can be used to conduct psychological investigations or track the dissemination of ideas. He says that research on the formation of so-called UFO cults and religions really did a lot for people who do religious studies.

Most UAP research to date has come from the world's militaries and intelligence organizations, which typically share the same outlook. He says that is not on the agenda. There is a break from that single-minded tradition.

To maximize the chances for NASA's study turning up anything of value, the space agency will have to successfully attract the right type of participants, such as Spergel, who can strike a balance between open-mindedness and rigor. The stigma that the research is pseudoscience makes it hard to do such a thing. The co-owner of Impact Observatory, a company that uses machine learning to mine geospatial data for novel insights, says that scientists need to feel safe. They need to know that if they step up to be part of the anomalies study, they won't be branded as extremists.

The outcome of NASA's study is questionable at the best of times. He says that being alert for anomalies is rarely a good idea. He says that such expeditions have a high chance of being a waste of money, especially if they seek to pick out individual anomalies from data sources that are not suited for that task. He says that most of the NASA missions are being done with spatial resolution that is too coarse. Higher-resolution data from other organizations could prove more useful if NASA data is used to check out the weather during a spotted object.

NASA's efforts may be driven by ulterior motives despite not being as subject to secrecy and military applications. One of the project's priorities will be to convert and preserve the space agency's Earth-observation archives into machine-readable formats from which scientists could eventually pry new insights with modern software. The project may be more about the data and less about searching for flying objects.

It's possible that other scientists will find their own "most dramatic" days from that data. The biggest discoveries from NASA could be called Paul or EUGENE.