One Former Astronaut’s Comments Have Changed People’s Views On Aliens

Bill Nelson is more than qualified to answer the question about extraterrestrial beings, too. This is a man who’s actually been to space, after all. And while the NASA administrator may not have explored the Moon or visited Mars, his experience beyond Earth did bring a few things about our planet into focus for him.

Nelson was part of a crew of seven who, in January 1986, orbited the Earth for six days aboard the Columbia shuttle. He had the position of payload specialist and helped deploy the SATCOM KU satellite. And the more than two million miles he traveled during that time makes Nelson someone you want to listen to about life off-planet.

The former astronaut spoke to The Guardian about the importance of this event in December 2021. Nelson said he realized the Earth is “beautiful,” “colorful,” and “fragile.” He also explained, “That experience informed a lot of my public life because I wanted to be, when I returned, a better steward of our planet.” And that, no doubt, includes shaping his thoughts about worlds beyond our solar system.

It certainly helped Nelson figure out how he wanted to make our own world a better place to live in. He said, “I think you can just basically boldly say I became more of an environmentalist when I went into space, and that has informed my environmental record now going on 44 years of public service.” He gained a new perspective about the people of Earth, too.

Nelson explained, “I didn’t see racial divisions and I didn’t see religious divisions and I didn’t see political divisions — the things that bedevil us here on the face of the Earth. What I saw, we were all citizens of planet Earth, and that’s informed my public service as well.” The experience has also evidently shaped how he thinks about extraterrestrial civilizations.

But then Nelson doesn’t just have his own experiences to rely on when it comes to this stuff. He’s the top dog at NASA, after all, and that means he has access to the kind of information the public does not. For example, Nelson’s got to see the classified version of a document on UFOs that the public only just glimpsed.

Nelson spoke to CNN in June 2021 in the aftermath of the Pentagon’s release of information about UFO sightings. While the general public could find this report, they apparently didn’t have the whole story. But it turned out Nelson had studied the parts of the “classified” version the public wasn’t privy to.

This report represented the first official investigation of its kind since the U.S. Air Force put together its famous Project Blue Book. And that venture had been shut down in 1969. So, people interested in the existence of real-life ETs were no doubt hoping this new document would answer some of their long-held questions.

The report was called “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” and it dropped in June 2021. It had been put together by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — and understandably made a few headlines. Why the interest? Well, the report included information about 143 “unidentified aerial phenomena” — or UAP, the fancy term for UFO — sightings from 2004 to 2021.

It’s not every day you realize there’s an official group called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (U.A.P.T.F.), either! But it’s even more fascinating to discover that this organization had spent time studying objects that “appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion.”

Elsewhere in the nine-page document, the task force revealed a few of the incidents they’d studied had similar details. It read, “In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency energy associated with UAP sightings.” But while these were unexplained, there was one case that could be solved.

The report found that one UFO sighting could be justified with “high confidence.” In fact, the sighting hadn’t been of a UFO at all — it’d been a big balloon losing its air. This was just a single case out of the 143 it studied, mind you. And the other incidents weren’t so conclusively written off.

There seemed to be little doubt, however, that most of the reported sightings were of real things. After all, most of the registered cases involved more than one type of sensor picking up the unidentified object. So, while one sensor recording something weird could be dismissed, multiple sensors finding the same thing was cause for more thought.

The task force pointed out that the number of sensors involved probably means everything was working correctly, as well. Having said that, the report still didn’t rule out at least some of the unidentified flying objects being the results of “sensor anomalies.” There was one other aspect of the investigation the document took pains to recognize, too.

Apparently, there’s a section of the population that seems to think every sighting of a UFO must be the result of some underground government technology. But the report wants you to know this is definitely not the case. So, all that was left for the document to do was to draw up its conclusions.

But, unfortunately, the report refused to be forced into making concrete judgments. It read, “The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP.” Yet even though this was the case, that doesn’t mean the report didn’t tell us anything.

There were limits to the data available, of course, but the report suggested “there was some clustering of UAP observations regarding shape, size, and, particularly, propulsion.” The document also noted the sightings were mostly at U.S. military locations. But that makes sense, considering the people on these bases are told to report any abnormalities.

One possible explanation for these sightings is the objects are different kinds of technology from other countries. But that would mean a foreign country has tech we don’t know about — which seems like a stretch. Still, the U.A.P.T.F. promised to investigate this possibility further, just in case. The task force then laid out its other conclusions.

Unfortunately for alien hunters, the report said the UFO sightings it’s looked into “probably lacks a single explanation.” But it did say individual sightings could each likely be thrown into one of five classifications: “airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG or industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’ bin.” And this is what got people interested.

After all, the “other bin” could mean anything. And if that’s true, then surely the possibility still exists that people really have seen and recorded aliens? That’s the question that CNN’s Pamela Brown posed to Bill Nelson when she chatted with him in June 2021. Nelson’s answers were surprisingly candid, too.

Nelson was open about the fact he’d seen the classified report — and that he was clearly taking the subject seriously. “[The Navy pilots] know that they saw something,” the NASA chief said. “They tracked it, they locked their radar onto it, they followed it.” And this is seemingly all Nelson needs to know to push the investigation to the next level.

Nelson continued, “Naturally, what I asked our scientists to do is to see if there’s any kind of explanation from a scientific point of view. I’m awaiting their report.” But it seems that Nelson hasn’t been content to let the scientists do all the work. It’s not the first time these reported sightings have gotten his attention, either.

Nelson revealed, “Three years ago, I talked to the Navy pilot when we were briefed in the Senate Armed Services Committee.” It’s unclear which pilot Nelson spoke to back then, but former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander Alex Dietrich was involved with one famous sighting — and she also found herself in the news around the same time as Nelson’s interview.

Dietrich’s sighting was featured in one of the “UFO videos” published by The New York Times in 2017. That clip — which came to be called the “Tic Tac incident” — was later confirmed and declassified by the Pentagon. The blurry images in the video seemed to show what looked like an oblong entity floating over the Pacific. Dietrich has been open about her feelings on the matter, too.

The former pilot told Reuters in June 2021 that the UFO didn’t have “any visible flight control surfaces or means of propulsion.” She also revealed that “it appeared to respond in a way that we didn’t recognize.” But she maintained that she doesn’t “identify as a UFO person.” And if Nelson had spoken to Dietrich back in 2017, he would’ve gotten the same response.

Dietrich said, “We don’t know what it was, but it could have been a natural phenomenon in human activity. But the point was that it was weird, and we couldn’t recognize it.” So, even though she doesn’t want to be seen to be stoking any conspiracy theories, the former pilot is happy to talk about her experience. And there’s a very good reason for that.

Dietrich explained, “Folks might be concerned about their careers or their church or something like that. They don’t want to be the kooky UFO person, so I guess I’m trying to normalize it by talking about it.” If Dietrich did chat with Nelson about the Tic Tac Incident, then, it’s possible her views influenced his.

And after reading the report and speaking to the pilots, Nelson has indeed come up with his own opinion. He told CNN, “My feeling is that there is clearly something there. It may not necessarily be extraterrestrial, but if it is a technology that some of our adversaries have then we’d better be concerned.” But how concerned should we really be?

CNN’s Brown was quick to follow up with that exact question. “Do our adversaries have the capability to create flying objects like this?” she asked. “We don’t think so,” replied Nelson. And Nelson followed up on this point in a discussion with the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics in October 2021.

Nelson said, “We hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology. But it’s something.” And while he seemingly wouldn’t be drawn into making any conclusive statements, Nelson is well aware the public wants to know about UFOs as much as he does. But he traces that thirst for knowledge back further than just these UFO videos.

Speaking to CNN, Nelson said, “People are hungry to know. And, of course, ever since Star Trek, you know, people are yearning to find out what’s out there in the cosmos: are we alone?” It’s no doubt this impulse to search for an answer to the unanswerable that’s fueled interest in this report. And Nelson really does get it.

Nelson sympathized, “The universe is so big. It’s 13 and a half billion years ago when the universe started. That’s pretty big. People are hungry for this kind of information, and they’re going to keep searching.” But not only are people going to keep looking for answers, NASA is also going to deep-dive on it.

Nelson confirmed, “We have a program in NASA called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” But before you go getting your hopes up, so far the search hasn’t gone well. “Thus far, we don’t have any receipt of a communication from something that’s intelligent,” said Nelson. But that doesn’t change how he feels about the possibility of alien life.

Twice during the CNN conversation, Nelson confirmed that he thought that aliens do exist. The first came early on in the chat, when he said he felt “there is something there” in the UFO videos. And then later, he answered his own question: “Are we alone? Personally, I don’t think we are.” It’s not just because the universe is so big, either.

Nelson pointed out that there’s already evidence of “other planets around other suns.” He could’ve been talking about, for instance, the discoveries of the Kepler space telescope. From 2009 to 2018, this incredible piece of tech worked in deep space and uncovered a huge, huge number of exoplanets. And Nelson is expecting to find even more in the future.

Speaking in the middle of 2021, Nelson said, “When we launch the James Webb Telescope in November, it will peer back in time, almost to the beginning, and then we’ll find additional information. We’ll find more planets.” And while the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope was delayed, it got off the ground on Christmas Day 2021.

The mission of the James Webb Space Telescope is to explore an array of phenomena in deep space. And the telescope will also look into the existence of galaxies in the far reaches of our universe. It could offer insight into how the universe came to be, which, naturally, is very exciting.

NASA is certainly expecting a lot from this new resource. It is, according to the space agency, “the world’s largest, most powerful, and most complex space science telescope ever built.” And if all goes well, NASA expects Webb to “solve mysteries in our solar system” and “look beyond to distant worlds around other stars.” Bill Nelson is extremely optimistic about its potential, too.

Nelson told Space.com in 2021, “We’re going to start to be able to determine, are there habitable atmospheres like our own revolving orbiting around other suns? That’s going to be pretty exciting to find that out.” And if Webb does send NASA this information, we’ll be fascinated to know whether or not there really is life beyond planet Earth.