NASA administrator, ex-senator, and former astronaut Bill Nelson has addressed a newly-declassified report by the US military that mentions 144 UFO sightings, hinting at the possibility of existing extraterrestrial civilisations.
"Yes, I've seen the classified report. It says basically what we thought. We don't know the answer to what those Navy pilots saw, they know that they saw something, they tracked it, they locked their radar onto it, they followed it, it would suddenly move quickly from one location to another", Nelson told CNN on Monday.
The administrator noted that he is awaiting reports from scientists, also adding that he had spoken with pilots after a briefing on the matter when he was still serving as a Florida senator.
"I talked to the Navy pilots when we were briefed in the Senate Armed Services Committee, and my feeling is that there is clearly something there. It may not necessarily be an extraterrestrial, but if it is a technology that some of our adversaries have, then we better be concerned".
The official noted that so far, NASA's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence programme has not discovered any "receipt communication from something that's intelligent".
"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? Personally, I don't think we are. The universe is so big, it's 13 and a half billion years ago is when the universe started. That's pretty big. But people are hungry for this kind of information and we're going to keep searching".
In the nine-page report, the government neither confirmed nor denied that the strange objects mentioned by the military could have been extraterrestrial in nature.