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NASA is putting a team together to study unidentified aerial phenomena, popularly known as UFOs, CNN reported on Thursday, citing the US space agency.

The team will gather data on "events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena -- from a scientific perspective," the agency said.

NASA said it was interested in UAPs from a security and safety perspective. There was no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin, NASA added. The study will begin this fall and is expected to take nine months.

"NASA believes that the tools of scientific discovery are powerful and apply here also," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.

"We have access to a broad range of observations of Earth from space -- and that is the lifeblood of scientific inquiry. We have the tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That's the very definition of what science is. That's what we do."

The team will be led by astrophysicist David Spergel, who is president of the Simons Foundation in New York City.

NASA said the limited number of observations of UAPs made it difficult to draw scientific conclusions about the nature of such events.

A first step for the team would be to attempt to establish which UAPs are natural, NASA said.