InvestigationNASA UAP Independent Study Team final report (14 September 2023)

In June 2022, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced the formation of a sixteen-member Independent Study Team to evaluate what NASA’s scientific assets could contribute to the study of unidentified anomalous phenomena. The team was chaired by Dr. David N. Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation and Charles A. Young Professor of Astronomy emeritus at Princeton. Members included planetary scientist Scott Kelly (retired NASA astronaut), oceanographer Paula Bontempi, atmospheric scientist Anamaria Berea, and others drawn from physical science, data science, and aviation safety.

The team conducted nine months of open hearings, briefings from AARO, and consultations with the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the commercial aviation industry. Its final report — a 33-page public document — was released on 14 September 2023 at a NASA Headquarters press conference. Spergel and Nelson presented the findings; Nelson concurrently announced the appointment of a NASA Director of UAP Research, whose name was initially withheld for security reasons, but disclosed within days as Dr. Mark McInerney.

The report’s central finding was epistemological rather than conclusory: the existing data available to NASA from civilian and commercial sensors are insufficient in calibration, resolution, and metadata coverage to enable the rigorous resolution of UAP cases. The team’s primary recommendation was that NASA leverage its scientific infrastructure — Earth-observation satellites, the agency’s relationships with commercial sensor operators, citizen- science crowdsourcing — to begin generating calibrated UAP data purpose-collected for scientific study. The team explicitly declined to evaluate the recovered-craft and biological-remains claims of the parallel intelligence-community disclosure cycle, noting that such evaluation is outside NASA’s statutory remit.

The report drew a careful line: the absence of high-quality data is not evidence of the absence of phenomena, and the presence of anomalous reports is not evidence of extraterrestrial origin. Bill Nelson at the press conference described his personal view that he would be “surprised” if intelligent life did not exist elsewhere in the universe — while making clear this was a personal statement, not a conclusion of the report.

The report is, alongside AARO’s Historical Record Report Volume 1 (March 2024), one of the two formal U.S. government scientific or investigative bodies to have publicly addressed the UAP question in the post-2017 disclosure window. Its recommendation for purpose-built scientific instrumentation remains, as of 2026, partly implemented: the GORP (Galileo-style Open Research Platform) initiative at the Harvard-affiliated Galileo Project predates the NASA report; NASA’s internal program has remained modestly funded.