The agency wants to develop a credibility scale so we know what to pay attention to:
Such a standard might help guide decisions. What about the people who have insisted that the White House is hiding space aliens? They doubtless sound less credible than the Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who insisted that Oumuamua is an extra-terrestrial solar sail. But on what are we basing that decision? Social class? If not, what? For that matter, what about the Pentagon’s recent admission that there are phenomena out there that we just can’t explain?
Guidelines are certain to be disputed but they would at least provide a basis for reasonable discussion. That might lead to more and better public education on the issues.
News, “NASA seeks standards for ET life claims ” at Mind Matters News
Now that looking for ET is a serious business, we need standards for evaluating what counts as evidence. As it happens, Avi Loeb comments here on the “Galileo Project,” as it is called:
The Galileo Project follows three major avenues of research. The first involves obtaining high-resolution images of UAP using an array of dedicated small-aperture telescope at various geographical locations. Extensive artificial intelligence/deep learning (AI/DL) and algorithmic approaches are needed to differentiate atmospheric phenomena from birds, balloons, commercial aircraft or drones, and from potential technological objects of terrestrial or other origin surveying our planet, such as satellites.
For the purpose of high-contrast imaging, each telescope will be part of a detector array of complementary capabilities from radar systems to optical and infrared cameras on telescopes. Parallax could also help to map the motion of objects in three dimensions. For example, two telescopes separated by three feet would see an object at a distance as large as 10 miles with a resolvable angular separation of ten arcseconds.
Avi Loeb, Announcing a New Plan for Solving the Mystery of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena at Scientific American (July 26, 2021)
Okay but never overlook the possibility that they are space cows.
See also: What if the unidentified aerial phenomena (UFOs) are much simpler than we think? Why assume, if the unexplained phenomena are ET, that they are more advanced than we are? What if the opposite is true?