It was almost exactly a year ago that the Pentagon and the American secret services had to publish a report about what information they had on the subject of "unidentified aerial phenomena", commonly known as UFOs.
The American Congress had requested the report after correspondingly puzzling footage from US Navy aircraft had reached the media.
However, the eagerly awaited result was nine pages long and listed 144 sightings for which no explanation could be found.
The word "extraterrestrial" does not appear anywhere in it.
Now, however, NASA has announced that it wants to take on the subject – and they are by no means afraid of the A word.
Right at the beginning of the presentation of the project on June 9, NASA manager Thomas Zurbuchen made the connection to the search for life in space, such as fossil biosignatures on Mars.
The American space agency now also has the lookout for possible "technosignatures" on foreign planets in its program.
How long ago was 1994 when Democratic Senator Richard Bryan of Nevada, with the words "Hopefully this will be the end of the Martian hunting season at taxpayer expense", stopped NASA from funding SETI activities, i.e. listening for extraterrestrial radio messages , turned off.
But not only politicians, but also the academic elite no longer seem to be alienated from the topic.
The new NASA project is being led by prominent astrophysicist David Spergel, professor emeritus at Princeton University.
Starting next fall, his team will spend nine months sifting through all the data on inexplicable atmospheric phenomena and working out methods for systematically collecting such data in the future.
Not an easy game for security authorities
In fact, the question of whether aliens exist is not unscientific per se.
And it is at least conceivable that they, if they exist, are behind one or the other unexplained atmospheric phenomenon.
That this line of thinking feeds a broad sector of popular culture is no reason to poke fun at NASA, either.
However, Thomas Zurbuchen admitted at the press event on the new program that the field is “relatively lacking in data”.
But the first thing to do is to increase the wealth of data far enough to enable a scientific approach to the topic in the first place.
But even if such data could in principle be obtained on the scale necessary for this, one can ask how a civil space agency can get the generals and slouches to really tell it everything their analysts know and with which technologies – even the secret ones – they figured it out.
It is more plausible to assume that the security services only reveal just enough of their actual knowledge or ignorance to ensure that the Russians or Chinese remain in the dark about the extent to which the Americans might actually mistake their spy technology for extraterrestrial hardware.