NASA holds 1st public meeting on UFO study – 05/31/2023 – Science

A NASA panel formed last year to study what the government calls “unidentified aerial phenomena,” commonly referred to as UFOs, holds its first public meeting on Wednesday, ahead of a report expected in the coming weeks.

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

“If I were to sum up in one line what I feel we’ve learned, it’s that we need high-quality data,” panel chair David Spergel said during the keynote speech.

The focus of Wednesday’s four-hour public session “is to carry out final deliberations before the agency’s independent study team publishes a report,” NASA said in announcing the meeting.

The team has “several months of work ahead of them,” said Dan Evans, a senior researcher at NASA’s science unit, adding that panel members have been subjected to online abuse and harassment since the beginning of their work.

“Harassment only leads to further stigmatization of the UAP field, significantly hampering the scientific process and discouraging others from studying this important subject,” NASA science chief Nicola Fox said in her keynote address.

The panel represents the first inquiry of its kind ever conducted under the auspices of the US space agency into a matter that the government has already entrusted to the exclusive and secret purview of military and national security officials.

The NASA study is separate from a newly formalized investigation, Pentagon-based account of unidentified aerial phenomena documented in recent years by military aviators and analyzed by US defense and intelligence officials.

Panel officials, having relied on unclassified data sensors, indicated that they encountered many of the same obstacles as their Pentagon counterparts in studying unidentified objects.

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

The parallel efforts by NASA and the Pentagon, both undertaken with some semblance of public scrutiny, highlight a turning point for the government after decades of debunking, debunking and debunking sightings of unidentified flying objects — long associated with notions of flying saucers. and aliens—dating back to the 1940s.

While NASA’s science mission was seen by some as promising a more open approach to the topic, the US space agency said from the outset that it was not jumping 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 effort to investigate these sightings has led to hundreds of new reports now under review, although most remain classified as unexplained.

The head of the Pentagon’s newly formed All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office said the existence of intelligent alien life has not been ruled out, but that no sightings have produced evidence of extraterrestrial origins.