While the Pentagon has confirmed the sightings of UFOs over the last couple of years, these are still unexplained. In response, NASA is forming its own independent team for the purpose of studying UFOs. 

The confirmed UFO sightings certainly have many scientists and officials boggled, but there are some that find this outside of the responsibility of NASA. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s science mission chief stated that this might seem like a “kind of selling out” in the eyes of the scientific community, this being such a controversial subject. 

“We are not shying away from reputational risk,” Zurbuchen said during a National Academy of Sciences webcast. “Our strong belief is that the biggest challenge of these phenomena is that it’s a data-poor field.”

NASA considers it important to get to the bottom of what it calls UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena. And if they can, it will be for a bargain. The study will only be using information publicly available and will cost no more than $100,000. 

It will begin in the fall and last for nine months. It will be led by astrophysicist David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation for advancing scientific research, who expects to come up with multiple explanations for UAPs. 

“We have to approach all these questions with a sense of humility,” Spergel said. “I spent most of my career as a cosmologist. I can tell you we don’t know what makes up 95% of the universe. So, there are things we don’t understand.”