Back in September 2019 (during what some might call "the before times,"), half a million people joined a half-serious Facebook group called "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us." The group's name was self-explanatory: These people had heard the notorious conspiracy theory that the American government possesses evidence of extraterrestrial life at the Area 51 facility near Groom Lake in southern Nevada. With varying degrees of sincerity, they insisted that the government had a responsibility to disclose what it knows about the possibility that UFOs have visited Earth.
Three years later, we may not know much more about the secretive Area 51 military installation, but NASA is creating an investigative team animated by the same curious spirit as that Facebook group. In NASA's own words, when this team gets started in the autumn, it will "examine unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) – that is, observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena – from a scientific perspective."
