NASA’s UAP Efforts: the hope of 2023 vs. the reality of 2024

Yearbook chapter - Abridged/Free

NOTE: the full version of this chapter will be published in the UFO Disclosure Yearbook 2024.

By the end of 2023, NASA had a newly appointed Director of UAP Research and a raft of recommendations from the independent UAP Study Team it had commissioned to advise NASA on how to use its assets to study UAP (see Yearbook 2023, chapter 2.12). It also had an administrator in Bill Nelson who was interested in the topic, well informed on recent military UAP encounters, having served in the Senate until 2019, and possessing both the will and the skill to guide the space agency through the challenges of UFO stigma that would inevitably arise. What outcomes did this wealth of UAP assets produce in 2024? So far as we know, very little of consequence.

In all of 2024, there were no NASA official public acts or statements on UAP, no press conferences, no press releases. To anyone paying cursory attention to NASA’s sudden UAP interest, and especially to those who sneered at that interest, it seems NASA’s only involvement with this taboo topic was limited to a media teleconference and a media townhall in 2022, one public meeting and one press conference in 2023, and one 36-page report. Perhaps it could all be chalked up to a flight of fancy. A momentary scientific curiosity that failed to pan out. Or as The Atlantic’s space reporter Marina Koren once suggested, the fool’s errand of a single, mercurial, non-scientist leader at NASA, Bill Nelson.

That is not to say that the UAP Study Team did not have a lasting impact on the agency or the ongoing discussion about UFOs happening in the public and in the scientific community. I will turn to its legacy in the next chapter. But the hope that NASA would mount an active, ongoing investigation of UAP as a civilian counterpart to the DoD/IC’s AARO, which was a clear possibility in 2023, seems off the table for now.

I base that assessment on NASA’s total silence on UAP since 2023, an in-depth interview with UAP Study Team member Mike Gold on January 7, 2025, and an official confirmation from a NASA spokesperson.

Mark McInerney, NASA UAP Research Director

The UAP Study Team was one of NASA’s Independent Study Teams, a standard agency practice of convening outside experts to provide unbiased recommendations on a particular problem set. None of the team members were current NASA employees. As such, NASA was at liberty to downplay and ignore the team’s recommendations, or champion them. On September 14, 2023, NASA leadership accepted the UAP Study Team’s formal recommendations with great fanfare—well, a flurry of beaming press releases, and a full press conference at NASA Headquarters led by Administrator Bill Nelson, Dr. Nicola Fox, Associate Administrator, Science Mission Directorate, and Dan Evans, Assistant Deputy Associate Administrator for Research. On this day, as a gesture of NASA’s ongoing commitment to studying UAP, these leaders made exactly one official commitment—the creation of the UAP Director of Research role, and naming NASA employee Mark McInerney to that position.

According to Mike Gold, the position was vacated a year later and remains vacant. After serving in the role for one year, McInerney was rotated out to other duties and no one else was rotated in. Gold told me, “I'm afraid my understanding is that that person has been reassigned, and now we have no one working UAP, at least explicitly at the agency.”

I reached out to NASA’s press office to confirm this, and on February 7, 2025, I received the following reply from a NASA spokesperson:

“Mark McInerney, NASA’s Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena director of Research, completed his detail assignment in September 2024, and is now serving the agency in a leadership role within NASA. The position is currently vacant and the agency stands ready for additional collaboration with the Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office for support as appropriate.”

When NASA announced the director position, the duties were “to centralize communications and leverage NASA’s extensive resources and expertise to actively engage in the whole-of-government UAP initiative,” which is AARO. The UAP director would “ensure that the agency’s vast analytical capabilities, including its proficiency in data management, machine learning and artificial intelligence, are contributed to the government’s unified UAP effort.” So this was to be AARO’s point-person at NASA, someone at the space agency who would pick up AARO’s phone calls and help them answer whatever questions they were calling about. Perhaps McInerney and his supervisors realized after a year that AARO did not call often enough or with enough requests to necessitate a full-time director position. We know from AARO’s 2024 UAP Report that 49 UAP were reported in the space domain, but all of these were observed from the ground or airplanes, and are generally thought to be reflections off satellites.

Gold suggested to me that the position could have been more than that, and McInerney had plans that went beyond just supporting AARO. When Gold was on the UAP Study Team he was vocal about his desire to have the panel recommend that NASA open a permanent though small UAP office. This did not make it into the list of recommendations, and he was disappointed that the director position fell short of that, but he nonetheless considered it “a modest step forward.” He told me, “I had hoped for more, but I was very pleased that we were at least taking a modest step.”

When I asked Gold if it was evident at the time that McInereny was only going to be ancillary to AARO, he said this:

“Yes, in part. My understanding, though, was that it could have been more than that, and was hoped to be that, for example, the crowdsourcing that I think Mark McInerney had some good plans relative to implementing the crowdsourcing concept, and now obviously can't do that. So I think that there was certainly hope. And I don't want to put words in Mark's mouth, but the hope was that there could be some proactive activities beyond just responding to AARO, but particularly along lines of what the Independent Study Team recommended.”

The crowdsourcing idea in the Study Team’s report called for an open-source smartphone app that would “simultaneously gather imaging data and other smartphone sensor metadata from multiple citizen observers worldwide” in order to support analysis of UAP sightings. AARO, having been pushed by Congress to collect civilian UAP data, may eventually dust off this recommendation.

Let’s turn to Gold’s other views about NASA’s stance toward UAP as we enter 2025.

Mike Gold, space policy expert, sci-fi fan

Mike Gold spent the formative years of his boyhood stargazing in Big Sky Country, northeastern Montana. He came of age in the 1970s and ‘80s, which was a golden age for kids interested in space. “I was watching Star Trek, interested in UFOs and NASA and the space shuttle, superheroes,” he told me, adding, “my interests have not evolved much since then.” Once he got his law degree, he put it to use living out his childhood dreams with a career in the space industry. He worked at Bigelow Aerospace for thirteen years and was involved in the inflatable modular attachment to the space station called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM). He joined NASA in 2019 as the Associate Administrator for Space Policy and Partnerships, with a focus on negotiating norms of behavior in space and international agreements. He led the development and implementation of the Artemis Accords, which established some very Star Trek-y “norms of behavior to ensure a peaceful and prosperous future in space for all of humanity.”⁹⁹⁹ Upon leaving NASA he became the Chief Growth Officer for Redwire Space, an aerospace company that is providing navigation equipment for NASA’s Artemis mission to return humans to the Moon in the coming years. Gold is a space policy guy who never saw the need to let go of the promise and the possibilities of his childhood space dreams.

As a member of the UAP Study Team, he helped author the following set of recommendations that were included in the final report: NASA should actively seek more comprehensive UAP data; crowdsource UAP data from contemporary sightings via a cell phone app or other means; improve FAA reporting by making it truly anonymous; calibrate NASA satellites, telescopes and sensors to study UAP; do data processing and data mining for UAP evidence in NASA’s archives; create an analytic framework that defines the background “haystack” in order to find the anomalous “needle” of UAP.

I asked Gold if he was aware of any progress on any of those objectives that's been made in the year since the report was released. He replied, “Relative to the recommendations being implemented, I haven't seen that yet.”

This was exactly what he had feared when the UAP Study Team began meeting. At their public meeting in May 2023, Gold was one of the only members of the team to stand up on stage and push for NASA to take a bigger, more assertive role in the field of UAP. Others shared their views on the intricacies of data management systems and separating out anomalous signatures, while Gold called for authoring studies and showing up at UAP conferences under the NASA banner. He also called for a permanent office. Here is how he expressed his concern from the stage:

“I’m very concerned that this could be effectively done on an ad hoc basis. And I’ve been a part of far too many panels and studies that end up sitting on the shelf. I don’t want this to be one of those exercises. I would call for and recommend a permanent office within NASA to support this activity. Albeit likely a modest one, but to collate this information, collate that data, to archive the information, and act as the open, forward-facing counterpart to Sean [Kirkpatrick] and AARO. I don’t want all of our work to end up being in vain.” (See Yearbook 2023, chapter 2.11)

When I read this quote back to him during our interview, he laughed. “If nothing else, I’m consistent,” he said. Based on what he’s been told about NASA’s UAP efforts in 2024, the ad hoc approach is exactly what NASA did. It was so ad hoc, and UAP such a low priority, that NASA realized they didn’t need, or could not afford, a permanent UAP director. Gold on the implications of this:

“I wanted to see a permanent office established, albeit modest one, for fear of occurring exactly what is happening, that the recommendations of the team have not been implemented. While I appreciated that we had Mark [McInerney] engaged, now we don't even have a single person dedicated to the issue. So I had articulated at the time that if we don't push for this, we have a great concern that the recommendations could just sit on the shelf and gather dust, and I'm concerned that we're on the road to that now.”

As for the future, Gold said, “I would really like to see our recommendations implemented and the issue being given a higher priority, particularly since I think there's much that can be done without spending a lot of money. And those are resources unfortunately NASA lacks, it's in a very difficult budget situation.”

The misalignment of priorities is key. A scarcity mindset toward funding has probably been part of NASA culture since the moon landings stopped. Scientists of all stripes have their preferred wish list that they would like NASA to prioritize, and all the jockeying that entails (moon landings vs. Mars missions vs. the space station; robots vs. human space exploration; atmospheric studies vs. technosignatures; astrobiology on Europa vs. Enceladus vs. Venus; deep space telescopes vs. asteroid retrievals, and on and on). There’s only enough money to do a fraction of what everyone at NASA wants to do. Adding UAP to the list is a big ask. Only a small minority are asking for it, while the majority do not even take the issue seriously. The underlying science is sparse, and there are no guarantees of a future return on investment. What the astronomer and astrobiologist Adam Frank said last year about scientists’ reluctance to study UFOs is true for NASA: “to take on a new project, you don't just dip in and dip out. It's literally, you're betting your life. To change topics, you're going to spend a year, five years, a decade…. Scientists are just like, ‘You're asking me to spend decades of my life on something that's going to end up, I'm going to find out that somebody was hoaxing or that the data wasn't very good.”⁹⁹⁹

But with any new field of science, you have to start somewhere, and this is what Gold advocated for while on the Study Team, forming an office within NASA that would become an institutional beachhead from which the field of UAP science could spread. “Something very modest, maybe it's just a couple of people that would be dedicated to it,” he told me, adding, “we could do something small, and I think the issue is important enough to justify it.” UAP only made it onto the very bottom of NASA’s long list of priorities in 2022 and 2023 because Bill Nelson was one of the few people, like Gold, for whom UAP was a personal priority. In the end, it seems, this was not enough to make the effort sustainable.

That said, Gold was cautiously optimistic that the next administration would pick up the ball where the Study Team left it. We spoke on January 7, 2025, two weeks before President Biden would hand the Executive Branch back to Donald Trump, and Bill Nelson would leave NASA to Trump’s appointee, not to mention turnover in DoD/IC leadership, who would have a large say in the classification levels of any UAP data. Gold’s optimism was based on no more inside knowledge than what you read in the newspaper, that Trump was bringing into his cabinet “people who are strong supporters of disclosure and have been involved in UAP,” such as Marco Rubio. He said, “my hope is that with the incoming administration at NASA, across the government, that the issue will be taken more seriously, and one of the things that should be done is implementing what I believe are relatively modest, common sense, low-cost recommendations of the UAP independent study team.” To what extent this optimism will pan out will be the thing to watch in 2025 and 2026. All we know is that the optimism of 2023 did not pan out in 2024.

I will let Gold sum up the UAP situation at NASA in 2024: “I felt good about the fact that there was an individual [McInerney] assigned to it. I'm now concerned that that individual is no longer assigned to support UAP, but remain hopeful that under the new administration, government wide, not just at NASA, that the issue will be taken much more seriously.”