NASA's First Public UFO Investigation Begins Debating Its Findings

This Wednesday the first public meeting of a panel created by NASA to study what the US government calls 'unidentified aerial phenomena' (UAF) and is commonly known as UFOs began in Washington.. The objective is to analyze what has been discovered since the formation of this working group last year.

The 16-member panel, which brings together experts from fields ranging from physics to astrobiology, was formed last June to examine UFO sightings and other data collected by both the government and private sectors.

“If I had to summarize in one line what I feel we have learned is that we need better quality data”, said the president of the panel, David Spergel, during his speech at the opening session.

NASA has said that the purpose of the four-hour public session on Wednesday at the agency's headquarters in Washington was to address “final deliberations” before the team of experts publishes a report, which according to Spergel is scheduled for the end of the year. of July.

The panel has “several months of work ahead of it,” said Dan Evans, a senior research official at NASA's scientific unit, and has denounced that its members have suffered harassment on social networks since they began their work.

“Such harassment only leads to further stigmatization of this field, significantly hindering the scientific process and discouraging others from studying this important topic,” NASA chief scientist Nicola Fox said during her keynote address.

The panel represents the first investigation of its kind ever conducted under the auspices of the US space agency on a subject that the government once entrusted to the exclusive and secret purview of military and national security officials.

This NASA study is independent of other Pentagon-based research into unidentified aerial phenomena documented in recent years by military aviators and analyzed by US Defense and Intelligence officials.. USA

This Wednesday, the members of the NASA panel, which are based on unclassified data, have indicated that they are running into many of the obstacles that their Pentagon counterparts have detected.. “Collection efforts are not systematic and fragmented across multiple agencies, often using uncalibrated instruments for scientific data collection,” Spergel said.

But these parallel initiatives by NASA and the Pentagon, both with some semblance of public scrutiny, mark a turning point for the US government after decades of debunking UFO sightings dating back to the 1940s and have been associated with flying saucers and extraterrestrials.

While some see NASA's science mission as promising a more open approach to the issue, the space agency has made it known from the outset that it wasn't jumping to conclusions.. “There is no evidence that UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin,” NASA stated when announcing the formation of the panel last June.

US defense officials have said the Pentagon's recent push to investigate these sightings has led to hundreds of new reports which are now being examined, although most are still considered to have no known explanation.

The head of the Pentagon's newly formed Office for the Study of All Domains Anomalies has stated that the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life has not been ruled out, but that evidence of such extraterrestrial origins has not been deduced from any sightings.