The NASA UAP Study
NASA convened an independent study team in 2022, published a report in September 2023, appointed a Director of UAP Research, and then largely went quiet. The study is notable for what it recommended, what it avoided, and what happened afterward with NASA’s own records.
The study team
Convened June 2022 under NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. 16 members chaired by David Spergel (astrophysicist, president of the Simons Foundation, former chair of the Princeton Astrophysics Department). Other members included Anamaria Berea (computational social scientist), Federica Bianco (astrophysicist), Paula Bontempi (oceanographer), Reggie Brothers (former Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering), Nadia Drake (science journalist), Mike Gold (former NASA associate administrator), David Grinspoon (astrobiologist), Scott Kelly (astronaut), Matt Mountain (president of AURA), Warren Randolph (FAA executive), Walter Scott (Maxar Technologies), Karlin Toner (FAA senior advisor), Shelley Wright (UCSD physicist), and Josh Semeter (BU engineering professor). Daniel Evans (NASA AADAR) served as Designated Federal Official.
The team members reported receiving harassment and threats after their appointment, which NASA cited as a reason for initially keeping member identities private.
The report (September 14, 2023)
The 33-page report made several recommendations:
Data quality: “The current UAP data collection efforts are not systematic or comprehensive enough to address the full scope of the problem.” NASA should use its expertise in AI, ML, and data science to develop better detection and analysis capabilities.
Open science: NASA should contribute to a “robust and systematic” data collection effort and make data publicly available. The study team endorsed transparency and destigmatization of UAP reporting.
No evidence of extraterrestrial origin: “There is no reason to conclude that existing UAP reports have an extraterrestrial source.” But the report qualified this by saying the limited data prevented definitive conclusions in any direction.
Systematic calibration: many UAP reports stem from miscalibrated or poorly understood sensors. NASA’s experience with sensor calibration across its fleet of Earth-observing and space instruments is directly relevant.
Aviation safety integration: NASA should coordinate with the FAA on UAP encounters that affect aviation safety.
What the report did NOT do
It did not investigate specific cases. Unlike the Congressional hearings (which featured specific incidents like Nimitz and Gimbal), the NASA study treated UAP as a data problem, not an investigation problem. The report contains no analysis of individual sightings, no assessment of military encounters, and no engagement with whistleblower claims.
It did not examine classified evidence. The team operated in an unclassified setting and did not have access to classified UAP data held by DoD, the IC, or AARO. This is a significant limitation: the most compelling evidence (if it exists) is precisely the evidence the team could not see.
It did not engage with the Congressional testimony. Grusch testified in July 2023 (two months before the report’s release) about crash retrieval programs. The NASA report makes no mention of these claims.
The Director of UAP Research
The same day the report was released (September 14, 2023), NASA Administrator Nelson announced Mark McInerney as NASA’s first Director of UAP Research. McInerney was a senior agency liaison to the DoD. Nelson stated: “If you ask me, do I believe there’s life in a universe that is so vast that it’s hard for me to comprehend how big it is? My personal answer is yes.”
McInerney was embedded within AARO as part of his role. His mandate: implement the study team’s recommendations, coordinate with other agencies, and apply NASA’s scientific capabilities to the UAP question.
McInerney retired from NASA in July 2025 via the agency’s delayed resignation program. During his 22-month tenure, he published no UAP research, released no datasets, issued no public reports, and made no public statements about his work. The Debrief reported in July 2024 that NASA was still “reviewing the recommendations and determining next steps,” a year after the report’s publication. The position of NASA Director of UAP Research now has its own Wikipedia page, which documents the absence of visible output.
The AIAA’s 2025 year-in-review noted that while AARO pursued reforms, “NASA’s progress remains unclear.”
The GoFast FOIA revelations
Separate FOIA releases revealed that NASA’s panel never interviewed the Navy aviators who recorded the GoFast video and never had access to the raw sensor data. Panelist Josh Semeter acknowledged this limitation internally. Study chair David Spergel pushed back on the report’s wording, stating he did not believe the panel had reviewed enough cases to justify broad conclusions about high-speed UAP events and urged revision of the public language.
This means the panel’s most confident data-quality conclusions (that apparent anomalies are explained by poor calibration and misinterpretation) were made without examining the primary sensor data or interviewing the operators. The panel closely examined only one case.
The academic stigma dimension
A 2024 Nature study (Humanities and Social Sciences Communications) surveyed 1,460 faculty across 14 disciplines at 144 universities on UAP credibility. 95.82% of physics faculty said their discipline could evaluate UAP, but nearly 3 in 4 feared ridicule for studying the topic. This confirms the stigma the NASA study sought to address, while also suggesting the study’s destigmatization effort has not been sufficient.
Penn State historian Greg Eghigian described the NASA panel as “a sea change,” stating “close to a majority of academics now believe that the study of UFOs warrants scholarly research.”
The records destruction problem
A 2025 FOIA request by researcher Grant Lavac (published on the HM05 UAP Substack) revealed internal NASA communications about UAP records handling:
Dr. Daniel Evans (the same official who served as Designated Federal Official for the study team) stated: “NASA does not hold any records related to UAP. The only incidents that could have been previously attributed to UAP were all resolved.”
Evans acknowledged deleting unsolicited emails from the public about UAP sightings, citing a 2022 directive that such communications “should be immediately destroyed” as they weren’t pertinent business records.
The problems with this:
First, NASA directed the public to contact Evans about UAP through its website, then classified those contacts as “unsolicited” and destroyed them. You cannot invite correspondence and then claim it was unsolicited.
Second, the 2024 NDAA explicitly prohibits destroying UAP records and withholding public communications about UAP. If the emails were destroyed after this provision took effect, it may constitute a legal violation.
Third, the claim that NASA “does not hold any records related to UAP” is difficult to reconcile with the fact that NASA convened a 16-person study team, held public meetings, published a report, and appointed a Director of UAP Research. The study team presumably generated working documents, meeting notes, data analyses, and correspondence. The narrow definition of “records” that excludes all of this is legally questionable.
The von Rennenkampff critique
Marik von Rennenkampff (former DoD official, The Hill, August 2023) wrote that NASA’s approach to UAP “appears remarkably unscientific.” His criticisms:
The study operated entirely in the unclassified domain, unable to access the most relevant data. This is like studying a disease while being barred from seeing the patients.
NASA framed UAP as a data-quality problem rather than an investigation of specific cases. This avoids the hard question: what ARE the unexplained cases?
The destigmatization recommendation, while welcome, is no substitute for actual investigation with classified access.
Takeaway
The NASA UAP study was a credibility exercise that functioned more as institutional positioning than scientific investigation. The team was credentialed and the recommendations were reasonable, but the study operated without access to the evidence that matters (classified military encounters), avoided engaging with specific cases or whistleblower claims, and produced a Director of UAP Research whose office has published nothing in the 20 months since appointment.
The records destruction finding from the Lavac FOIA is the most concerning development. An agency that convened a formal study, published a report, and appointed a director now claims to hold no UAP records and destroyed public correspondence about the topic. Either NASA’s internal record-keeping is remarkably poor, or the narrow definition of “records” is being used to avoid disclosure obligations.
The study’s value is primarily negative: it demonstrates what happens when a prestigious scientific institution approaches UAP without access to classified data, without investigating specific cases, and without engaging with the most significant claims. The result is a report that recommended better data collection but collected no data, recommended transparency but destroyed correspondence, and recommended destigmatization while the study’s own members received threats.
Sources
- NASA UAP Independent Study Team Final Report, September 14, 2023 (33 pages, 86K chars extracted)
- NASA UAP press conference full transcript (Rev.com, 75K chars)
- NASA UAP main page (science.nasa.gov/uap)
- HM05 UAP Substack, “NASA’s Handling of UAP Records” (Grant Lavac FOIA analysis)
- The Debrief, “NASA Has Little to Say About UFOs” (July 2024)
- Undark, Interview with David Spergel (October 2023)
- Von Rennenkampff, “NASA’s Approach to UFOs Appears Remarkably Unscientific,” The Hill, August 2023
- Nature HASS, “Academic Freedom and the Unknown” (2024, survey of 1,460 faculty)
- AIAA Aerospace America, “The UAP Landscape in 2025”
- NPR, “Studying UFOs Should Involve More Science” (September 2023)
- Wikipedia: NASA UAP study, Mark McInerney, NASA Director of UAP Research
- Black Vault: UAP Task Force/NASA briefing (heavily redacted)
- UFO News: Leaked NASA emails on GoFast