BY JEFFREY KLUGER
SCIENCE
THE REAL CZARS MAY BE LONG GONE, BUT FOR DECADES, the White House has been keeping the honorific alive, appointing a director to oversee a task or issue, and bestowing the title along with it. We’ve had the Ebola czar, the drug czar, the budget czar, the climate czar, and more. On Sept. 14, at a press conference at NASA’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, the space agency gave the old role a new look, appointing the world’s first-ever UFO czar. Only NASA didn’t use either one of those terms.
For starters, fewer and fewer people talk about UFOs, or unidentified flying objects, anymore. The preferred term now is the more scientific-sounding UAP, for unidentified anomalous phenomenon. And NASA didn’t use the label czar either—another too-loose word for work that the space agency wants to keep solemn and serious. Instead, the full name for the new job is director of UAP research, and the man tapped to do the work is Mark McInerney, a former Pentagon liaison for NASA.
It will be McInerney’s job to study the sightings, advance science if vehicles are confirmed to be extraterrestrial, and protect national security if they’re of foreign military origin. He’ll have a lot to work with. Over the past 20 years, there have been more than 120 sightings of objects that often appear to be flying with no identified means of propulsion, and maneuvering in head-snapping ways that no conventional machines can manage. It helps that the sightings have been called in by witnesses people think of as unimpeachably reliable: U.S. military pilots.
THE OFFICIAL INTEREST in UAPs goes back a long way. In 2007, Congress established the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program Task Force to look into the phenomena. The group reached few conclusions, however, and was disbanded in 2012. But the sightings kept coming, and in June 2020, then President Donald Trump called on the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense to have their staffs collaborate on a study of their own. Their report landed just under a year later, and again the findings were unsatisfying—at least for people looking for intelligent life off the planet. There was no evidence that the objects were extraterrestrial in origin but no proof that they weren’t, either. The idea that they were friendlies—classified U.S. military vehicles out for a beta-test spin—was ruled out. It was also po
