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 keeping the honorific alive, appointing a director to oversee a task or issue, and bestowing the title along with it.

- JEFFREY KLUGER

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.