(NewsNation) — Investigative journalist Ross Coulthart said the NASA UAP report released Thursday is “positive” and “represents culture change.”

“What we’ve seen for the last 50 to 60 years, in America, is very much a dismissive attitude towards UAPs,” Coulthart said during an appearance Thursday on “Elizabeth Vargas Reports.” “It’s been suggested that they can all be explained away as normal, prosaic phenomena. … This report represents an acknowledgment that finally, NASA is taking UAPs seriously.”

The NASA team found no evidence that UAPs “have an extraterrestrial origin,” but administrators spoke Thursday on their future efforts to investigate UAPs, noting one goal is to remove the stigma of reporting unexplained phenomena.

They also emphasized discovery and investigation of the unknown are part of NASA’s DNA as an agency.

“We recommend that NASA play a prominent role in the whole-of-government effort to understand UAP by leveraging its extensive expertise to contribute to a comprehensive, evidence-based approach that is rooted in the scientific method,” the report’s conclusions page reads. “We specifically recommend that NASA utilize its existing and planned Earth-observing assets to probe the local environmental conditions associated with UAP that are initially detected by other means.”

It comes after a summer of spotlight on the issue, as whistleblower David Grusch told Coulthart there were people in the government with firsthand knowledge of extraterrestrial life and technology on Earth.

Coulthart’s interview with Grusch was part of the impetus for a UFO congressional hearing in July.

“We’ve got this kind of weird cognitive dissonance right now, where NASA is essentially saying that on the peer-reviewed literature, there’s no evidence,” Coulthart added. “But the simple fact is, if they actually start doing the work and start digging, I know, they’re going to find that there is evidence.”

NewsNation’s Bobby Oler and Stephanie Whiteside contributed to this report.