While the Perseverance rover continues to slowly crawl Mars in search of life, back on Earth NASA is set to put together a team that will study and quantify data surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), otherwise known as UFOs.

NASA believes the current number of UAP/UFO observations is not enough to draw scientific conclusions about the nature of previously reported events and is taking interest in the matter for national security and air safety precautions.

While NASA currently does not believe UAP/UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin, UFO team lead David Spergel said, “Given the paucity of observations, our first task is simply to gather the most robust set of data that we can, we will be identifying what data — from civilians, government, non-profits, companies — exists, what else we should try to collect, and how to best analyze it.”

NASA says the study will take around nine months to complete and all results will be made public. 

“All of NASA’s data is available to the public — we take that obligation seriously — and we make it easily accessible for anyone to see or study,” said Daniel Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. 

Photo: Karma Norbu via Shutterstock