NASA's 2023 UAP study: what the panel recommended

When NASA announced in June 2022 that it would commission a study of unidentified anomalous phenomena, it was careful about the scope. The agency was not opening an investigation into particular sightings. It was asking an outside group of scientists a narrower question: how should NASA, using unclassified data, help science understand UAP?

The answer arrived on September 14, 2023. Here is what the panel found and what it recommended.

Who was on the panel

The independent study team was chaired by David Spergel, an astrophysicist and president of the Simons Foundation. Its members came from astrophysics, aviation safety, oceanography, data science, planetary science and journalism. The group began its work in October 2022 and held a public meeting on May 31, 2023, before releasing its final report in September.

Two limits shaped everything:

• The panel worked only with unclassified information.
• It was asked to look at data and methods, not to rule on individual cases.

The core finding: a data problem

The report's central message is easy to state. The panel found no evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin. It also found that the biggest obstacle to answering the question either way is that most UAP observations are of poor quality.

What makes a sighting hard to analyze is usually not strangeness. It is missing information:

What's often missing	Why it matters
Accurate time	Needed to check satellite passes, aircraft tracks and planetary positions
Precise location and direction	Needed to reconstruct the line of sight
Sensor calibration	Without it, apparent speed, size and brightness can't be trusted
Multiple independent observations	One viewpoint can't fix distance, so it can't fix size or speed
Environmental context	Weather, lighting and terrain can produce or disguise effects

A blurry image of a light, with no time, no location and no distance, cannot be resolved by any amount of expert attention. The panel's report says so in plain terms.

What the panel recommended

The recommendations fall into a few groups.

Use what NASA already has

NASA operates Earth-observing satellites and holds large archives of imagery and measurements. The panel recommended that these assets be used to provide context for UAP reports, such as checking weather conditions or looking for corroborating observations, even though they were not designed for this purpose.

Build better collection

The report called for a systematic, rigorous approach to gathering data, including:

• Crowdsourcing through tools such as smartphone apps that capture time, location, orientation and camera data automatically.
• Open data, so that observations can be checked by independent researchers.
• Calibrated sensors, with known characteristics, so that measurements mean something.

Apply modern analysis

The panel suggested that artificial intelligence and machine learning could help search large datasets for anomalies, while noting that such tools are only as good as the data fed into them.

Work with aviation

Commercial pilots see a great deal of sky. The report encouraged NASA to work with the Federal Aviation Administration to improve how pilot reports are gathered and shared.

Reduce stigma

The panel noted that stigma discourages people, including pilots, from reporting what they see. It also noted that panel members themselves had been harassed online during the study. Reducing that stigma, the report argued, is part of getting better data.

What NASA did next

Alongside the report, NASA announced it would appoint a Director of UAP Research to coordinate the agency's work and communicate with other parts of government. NASA also set up a public web page for its UAP work.

What the report means for the rest of us

The panel's recommendations read almost like a field guide for skywatchers. If you see something you cannot explain, the most useful contribution you can make is not a theory. It is a well-documented observation:

1. A synced, accurate timestamp.
2. Your location and the direction you were facing.
3. Original, unedited image files.
4. Notes on weather and lighting.
5. An honest list of what you could not judge.

What remains open

The panel did not close the question of what UAP are. It said, in effect, that the question cannot be answered well with the data we have. That makes this report less a verdict than a plan. Whether the plan produces better observations over the coming years is the open part of this file, and it is worth checking back on.