NASA holds first public meeting on UFO study ahead of report

Washington | Portal

A NASA panel formed last year to investigate what the government is calling “unidentified aerial phenomena,” commonly referred to as UFOs, is holding its first public meeting Wednesday ahead of a report in the coming weeks.

The 16member panel, which includes experts in fields ranging from physics to astrobiology, was formed last June to examine unclassified UFO sightings and other data collected by the civilian government and commercial sectors.

“If I had to sum up in one line what I think we’ve learned, it’s that we need quality data,” said panel chair David Spergel during the keynote address.

The focus of Wednesday’s fourhour public session “is to conduct final deliberations before the agency’s independent study team releases a report,” NASA said in announcing the meeting.

The team has “several months of work ahead of them,” said Dan Evans, a senior researcher in NASA’s Science Department, adding that panel members have faced online abuse and harassment since they began their work.

“Harassment only adds further stigma to the UAP field, severely hinders the scientific process, and discourages others from engaging with this important topic,” NASA Chief of Science Nicola Fox said in her keynote address.

The panel represents the first investigation of its kind ever conducted under the auspices of the US Space Agency on an issue the government has already placed in the exclusive and secret purview of military and national security officials.

The NASA study is independent of a newly formalized investigation, Pentagonbased report on unidentified aerial phenomena documented by military aviators and analyzed by US Defense and Intelligence officials in recent years.

Officials at the panel, who had relied on unclassified data sensors, said they encountered many of the same obstacles as their Pentagon counterparts when examining unidentified objects.

“Current UAP data collection efforts are piecemeal and fragmented across multiple agencies, often using uncalibrated scientific data collection tools,” Spergel said.

The parallel efforts of NASA and the Pentagon, both undertaken with some semblance of public scrutiny, mark a turning point for the government after decades of debunking, debunking, and debunking sightings of unidentified flying objects long associated with the notion of flying saucers and aliens connected dates from the 1940s.

While NASA’s science mission was viewed by some as more promising for a more openended approach to the issue, the US space agency said from the start that it would not jump to conclusions.

“There is no evidence that UAPs are of extraterrestrial origin,” NASA said when announcing the panel’s formation in June.

US defense officials said the Pentagon’s recent efforts to investigate these sightings have resulted in hundreds of new reports being investigated, although most remain unexplained.

The head of the Pentagon’s newly formed AllDomain Anomaly Resolution Office said the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life isn’t out of the question, but no sightings have revealed evidence of extraterrestrial origins.