MYSTERY WIRE — NASA Administrator and former Senator Bill Nelson and other agency leaders held a press conference at the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters on Wednesday, June 2, and answered a question about unidentified aerial phenomenon.
The question came from David Smith of The Guardian, it was the second of a 2-part question. Before Nelson answered the first unrelated part, Smith asked, “What were you expecting from this report on unidentified aerial phenomena? Does anyone here have a view on what it might say and whether that is something NASA might be involved in or get involved in going forward?”
The first thing Nelson did was acknowledge he had previously known about UAPs in his “former capacity in Intel and the Armed Services Committee. And I’ve talked to those pilots.”
The video below is the exchange after Nelson answered the first part of the question.
Moderator
State of NASA – June 2, 2021
So the second part of his question was about unidentified aerial phenomenon, do you want to talk to NASA’s work identifying extraterrestrial life?
Bill Nelson – NASA Administrator
You want me to talk about that? Well, I just want you to know what you have seen on the TV recently, on the Navy films. I had known about this in my former capacity in Intel and the Armed Services Committee. And I’ve talked to those pilots. And they think it’s real. So I had talked to Thomas, Dr. Z, about what specifically we could do from a science perspective, in addition to an Intel perspective, to try to bring any additional light to this. You want to comment on that?
Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen – Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate
Yeah, look, I mean, I’m happy to in the realm of science, we’re all about unidentified issues, and objects and whatever before, that’s what we do. We find something with our observatories, looking at the sky looking at the earth, and we go analyze it. We have, you know, history is full of examples of things that were identified, or were referred to as UFOs, you know, some types of clouds, you know, phenomena, better phenomena that way. And, and for me, I personally think that as we look at, the origin of life and other worlds, and then look at, and really what we, what we, especially at the molecular, you know, and bacterial level, which is what we’re really using the tools of science for, the kind of questions that focus on life elsewhere, are, are very much in the realm of what we do using the tools of science. So we will do whatever we can to move our understanding forward. In many cases, all I wanted to just say what we learned so far in the last few decades is people tend to underestimate nature. Nature is an amazing place where a lot of miracles happen. That, you know, once we understand, it’s like, why didn’t we think of that? But the point is, there’s amazing science out there that remains to be discovered. We’re committed to continue to do that, especially as we take on new tools, whether it’s James Webb, whether it’s, you know, you know, the Dragonfly outer missions, to look at life in other in other worlds.
Kathy Lueders – Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations in NASA
But if anyone knows how to do spacecraft design like that, I would love to talk to them.