The first public meeting of a NASA panel studying what the government calls “unidentified aerial phenomena,” known as UFOs, began Wednesday to discuss the findings since its formation last year. This 16-member panel, made up of experts in fields ranging from physics to astrobiology, was formed last June to examine sightings of unclassified UFOs, referred to as UAPs, and other data collected by the government and commercial sectors. civilians.
During his keynote address, panel chair David Spergel said, “If I had to sum up in one sentence what I feel we’ve learned, it’s that we need high-quality data.” The four-hour public session at the agency’s headquarters in Washington focused on “final deliberations” before the release of a report that is scheduled for late July.
The research team still has “several months of work ahead of it,” according to Dan Evans, a senior research official at NASA’s science unit, who also said panel members have been subjected to online abuse and harassment since he started his work.
The NASA study is independent of a recently formalized investigation based at the Pentagon into unidentified aerial phenomena documented in recent years by military aviators and analyzed by US defense and intelligence officials.
Panel officials noted that they have encountered similar hurdles as their Pentagon counterparts in studying unidentified objects, as current UAP data collections are “disorganized and fragmented across various agencies, often using uncalibrated instruments for collection,” according to Spergel.
These parallel efforts by NASA and the Pentagon, carried out with some degree of public scrutiny, mark a turning point for the government after decades of deflecting and discrediting sightings of unidentified flying objects, long associated with spacecraft and aliens since the 1940s.
Although NASA’s science mission was seen by some as a more open approach to the issue, the US space agency made it clear from the outset that it would not jump to any conclusions. US defense officials have said the Pentagon’s recent push to investigate such sightings has led to hundreds of new reports being investigated, though most remain unexplained.
The head of the Pentagon’s newly created Office of All Domains Anomaly Resolution has said the existence of intelligent alien life has not been ruled out but that no sightings have produced evidence of extraterrestrial origin.