NASA's UFO Panel Didn't Say 'Aliens' or 'Nothing.' It Said Something Harder

On the morning of September 14, 2023, NASA did something it had spent decades avoiding. It held a press briefing about UFOs.

The space agency was releasing the final report of its Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team: 16 outside experts, including retired astronaut Scott Kelly, chaired by astrophysicist David Spergel of the Simons Foundation.

Expectations were enormous. Half the internet wanted a confession. The other half wanted a debunking.

They got neither. What the panel delivered was a slim report, about three dozen pages, that never reviewed a single past sighting, and that may be the most quietly damning document of the disclosure era. Its message: we can't answer the question, because nobody has been collecting the evidence properly.

A science agency walks into a UFO story

NASA announced the study on June 9, 2022. Its charge was narrow and technical: identify what data exists, how to collect better data in the future, and how NASA could help.

That scope was deliberate. The report's foreword, signed by NASA science chief Nicola Fox, says it plainly: "This is not a review of previous UAP incidents."

The team worked unclassified only. NASA's FAQ notes that a security clearance "was not a requirement as the team is only studying unclassified data." The panel saw what the public could see, plus whatever the Pentagon's UAP office chose to share in open session.

The meeting where it got personal

The panel's only public meeting came on May 31, 2023, at NASA headquarters in Washington.

"If I were to summarise in one line what I feel we've learned, it's we need high-quality data," Spergel said in his opening, according to Al Jazeera.

Sean Kirkpatrick, then director of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), told the panel his office had investigated roughly 800 reports, and that about 2 to 5 percent remained unexplained after investigation, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Then came the uncomfortable part. Panel members had been harassed online since the study began. The final report puts it on paper: "At least one scientist serving on the study team reported receiving negative (hate) mail from colleagues due to their membership." Others "were ridiculed and criticized on social media."

The report's verdict on that abuse is blunt. Such criticism, "either by detractors or by proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, are anathema to the scientific method."

What the report actually found

Read it end to end and one theme repeats on nearly every page. The evidence is not good enough, and that's not the witnesses' fault.

The executive summary says analysis is "hampered by poor sensor calibration, the lack of multiple measurements, the lack of sensor metadata, and the lack of baseline data." Detection of UAP, it says elsewhere, "is often serendipitous, captured by sensors that were not designed or calibrated for this purpose."

"At present, UAP analysis is more limited by the quality of data than by the availability of techniques."

The report also made a point skeptics and believers both tend to skip. The strongest physical constraints, it said, are on conventional objects. We know how fast drones, balloons and planes can move. So "any well-characterized observation of velocities and accelerations outside of that range" would be "scientifically interesting," and the key to proving it is pinning down distance.

That cuts both ways. If unidentified objects move at ordinary speeds, the panel wrote, "this likely points towards a conventional explanation." But "convincing evidence of verified anomalous accelerations and velocity would point towards potentially novel explanations."

The images inside the report

The report includes stills from Pentagon MQ-9 drone footage, and they make the problem visible.

One shows a "South Asian Object" trailing what looks like an atmospheric wake. AARO later assessed it as "a likely commercial aircraft"; the wake was "likely a sensor artifact resulting from video compression."

Another shows "an apparent silver, orb-like object in the Middle East." Its caption is short: "Due to limited data, the object remains unidentified."

Same sensor family, same agency, two different outcomes. The difference wasn't the object. It was the data.

So, aliens?

The panel addressed it directly, and carefully.

"To date, in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, there is no conclusive evidence suggesting an extraterrestrial origin for UAP," the report says. Later, in a section on technosignatures: "At this point there is no reason to conclude that existing UAP reports have an extraterrestrial source."

But the same passage keeps the door open. If extraterrestrial objects were here, they would have had to cross the solar system, so there is "an intellectual continuum" between distant technosignatures and "potential unknown alien technology operating in Earth's atmosphere." Extraterrestrial life, the report says, "must be the hypothesis of last resort."

At the briefing, then-Administrator Bill Nelson summed it up: "We don't know what these UAP are but we're going to try to find out," according to HuffPost. "But whatever we find we're going to tell you."

The roadmap: seven things NASA was told to do

The recommendations are where this report earns its keep. The panel told NASA to:

1. Use its Earth-observing satellites to check environmental conditions, like weather and atmosphere, at the time and place of UAP sightings.
2. Partner with commercial satellite companies, whose sub-meter imagery the panel said is "well-matched to the typical spatial scales of known UAP."
3. Push multispectral and hyperspectral sensing as part of "a rigorous data acquisition campaign."
4. Apply AI and machine learning, but only once there is clean, calibrated baseline data to train on.
5. Explore a crowdsourcing app, "open-source smartphone-based apps" that capture images and sensor metadata from multiple citizen observers.
6. Fix civilian reporting. The panel noted FAA guidance told citizens to call local police or private groups, which it called "inadequate for drawing scientific inferences."
7. Use the Aviation Safety Reporting System, the confidential pilot reporting system NASA runs for the FAA, which receives about 100,000 reports a year, to collect commercial pilot UAP reports.

The report also tied stigma directly to missing data. Between March 2021 and August 2022, it noted, the Pentagon received 247 new UAP reports, compared with 263 in the previous 17 years, once military aviators were encouraged to speak up.

The name NASA almost didn't release

At the briefing, NASA announced it was creating a new post, director of UAP research, but declined to name the person, citing the harassment panelists had faced. "Science needs to be free," said Daniel Evans, the NASA official who ran the study, according to HuffPost.

About eight hours later, NASA reversed course and named Mark McInerney, who had previously served as the agency's UAP liaison to the Defense Department, NewsNation and NASA's own release reported.

Three years later

Here is where the story gets uncomfortable for NASA.

Its UAP web page still lists the 2023 report as its most recent product. Its FAQ, updated since, now opens by applauding "President Donald J. Trump's direction for whole-of-government transparency," a reference to the 2026 federal UAP file releases. Then it says: "NASA does not actively search for UAP."

On funding, the FAQ is just as clear: "NASA has not established a program to search for UAP, so there is no associated programmatic funding."

When the Pentagon began posting declassified UAP files in May 2026, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote that the agency would "remain candid about what we know to be true," NBC News reported.

We could not find a public NASA progress report on the panel's specific recommendations, including the crowdsourcing app.

What we know, and what we don't

What we know

• NASA's panel found no reason to conclude existing UAP reports are extraterrestrial, while calling the question scientifically legitimate.
• It said the main obstacle is poor, uncalibrated data and the stigma that suppresses reports.
• NASA says today it has no dedicated UAP search program or programmatic funding.

What we don't

• Which of the seven recommendations, if any, NASA has implemented.
• What the director of UAP research post has produced publicly since 2023.
• What the unresolved cases, like the Middle East orb, actually were.

The report nobody wanted

Believers wanted NASA to confirm. Skeptics wanted NASA to close the case. The panel refused both and said the honest thing: you can't settle this with blurry clips and secondhand stories, so build the instruments.

That's not a cop-out. It's a challenge. And three years on, the clearest measure of how seriously Washington takes UAP science may be whether anyone ever picked it up.

Should NASA get real money and a real program to chase UAP data, or is that a job for the Pentagon alone? Tell us where you land in the comments.

Sources

• Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team Report — NASA, 2023
• UAP Independent Study — NASA Science
• UAP Frequently Asked Questions — NASA Science
• NASA Releases UAP Independent Study Report, Names Research Director — NASA release via Astrobiology.com, 2023
• NASA UFO team holds first public meeting on unexplained sightings — Al Jazeera, 2023
• NASA's experts talk UAPs ahead of final report — Los Angeles Times via Anchorage Daily News, 2023
• NASA Study Finds No Evidence That UFOs Have Extraterrestrial Origin — HuffPost, 2023
• NASA walks back decision to keep UAP researcher anonymous — NewsNation, 2023
• Pentagon releases declassified UFO files — NBC News, 2026