Good idea, a waste of time and money, or worse?

United States space agency NASA is launching a study of unidentified aerial phenomena (aka UAPs or UFOs) as part of a new push toward high-risk, high-impact science.

The space agency announced on Thursday, local time, that it is setting up an independent team to see how much information is publicly available on the matter and how much more is needed to understand unexplained sightings.

Its specialists will also consider how best to use all this information in the future.

NASA’s science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen, acknowledged the traditional scientific community might see NASA as “kind of selling out” by venturing into the controversial topic, but he strongly disagreed.

“We are not shying away from reputational risk,” Dr Zurbuchen said during a National Aeronautics and Space Administration webcast.

“Our strong belief is that the biggest challenge of these phenomena is that it’s a data-poor field.”

Full report

The US government has just held an inquiry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Aerospace_Threat_Identification_Program that didn’t come up with anything.

Maybe so many people are getting interested that governments can’t just ignore them.

rumpole said:

The US government has just held an inquiry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Aerospace_Threat_Identification_Program that didn’t come up with anything.

Maybe so many people are getting interested that governments can’t just ignore them.

It’s been mentioned they could belong to a foreign power with technology far more advanced than the USA.
If so though why bother with conventional technology for flying.
It would be exciting if they were real but I imagine not

rumpole said:

The US government has just held an inquiry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Aerospace_Threat_Identification_Program that didn’t come up with anything.

Maybe so many people are getting interested that governments can’t just ignore them.

They’ll prolly discover that the UFOs come from the other side of the flat earth.

Tamb said:

rumpole said:

The US government has just held an inquiry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Aerospace_Threat_Identification_Program that didn’t come up with anything.

Maybe so many people are getting interested that governments can’t just ignore them.

They’ll prolly discover that the UFOs come from the other side of the flat earth.

The other side would consider themselves to be on the top

With all these superpowers imagine a poor country or some poor islanders getting hold of alien technology and forcing real change.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tamb said:

rumpole said:

The US government has just held an inquiry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Aerospace_Threat_Identification_Program that didn’t come up with anything.

Maybe so many people are getting interested that governments can’t just ignore them.

They’ll prolly discover that the UFOs come from the other side of the flat earth.

The other side would consider themselves to be on the top

With all these superpowers imagine a poor country or some poor islanders getting hold of alien technology and forcing real change.

Forcing real change but in a clever way.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tamb said:

rumpole said:

The US government has just held an inquiry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Aerospace_Threat_Identification_Program that didn’t come up with anything.

Maybe so many people are getting interested that governments can’t just ignore them.

They’ll prolly discover that the UFOs come from the other side of the flat earth.

The other side would consider themselves to be on the top

With all these superpowers imagine a poor country or some poor islanders getting hold of alien technology and forcing real change.

It could be the way to go, some who is actually altruistic and want change for the better not wanting anything for themselves uses alien technology to convince the world to change in exchange for it.

Would be nice if the aliens took out Vlad, but it would probably breach their Prime Directive.

rumpole said:

Would be nice if the aliens took out Vlad, but it would probably breach their Prime Directive.