How NASA Got a ‘ UFO Czar ’ —And Why it Matters

The real czars may be long gone, but for decades, the White House has been doing a good job of keeping the role—or at least the honorific—alive, appointing a director to oversee a particular 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. Yesterday, at a press conference at NASA’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, the space agency gave the old role a new look, appointing the country’s, and indeed the world’s, first-ever UFO Czar. Only NASA didn’t use either one of those terms. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] For starters, fewer and fewer people—or at least those who want to be taken seriously—talk about UFOs, or unidentified flying objects, anymore; there’s too much of a Big Foot, Loch Ness Monster, moon-landings-were-faked feel to the label. The preferred term now is UAP, for unidentified anomalous (or, variously, aerial) phenomenon. And NASA didn’t use the label czar either—another too-loose term 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 McInernay, a former Pentagon liaison for NASA, who, for the better part of 25 years, has been on the government science beat, serving in multiple positions at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; the National Hurricane Center; an...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news