After decades of the U.S. government generally avoiding discussion of UFOs, NASA and the Department of Defense have begun investigating mysterious, unexplained sightings, aerial or not: what are now becoming unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs. named. NASA launched a nine-month UAP survey in October. In the spirit of the space agency’s goal of transparency for that work, it livestreamed a public meeting of its independent UAP study team on Wednesday. The panel concluded that it needed quality data, noting that the fragmentary nature of what was available to analyze has limited research on UAPs.
The topic of UAPs “has captured the attention of the public, the scientific community and the government alike,” Daniel Evans, deputy deputy administrator for research at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said at the start of the meeting. “It is now our collective responsibility to investigate these events with the rigorous scientific scrutiny they deserve.”
The 16-member study group includes planetary scientist David Grinspoon, former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and science journalist Nadia Drake. It is chaired by David Spergel, an astrophysicist and president of the non-profit scientific organization The Simons Foundation.
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The NASA team will write a final report sometime in July. The research team’s mission isn’t to pass judgment on the nature of UAPs, Spergel said, but to pave the way for future research. They are intended to clarify how NASA can scientifically investigate UAPs. To that end, at Wednesday’s meeting, they discussed current knowledge about UAPs (these aren’t alien), standards of evidence for determining exactly what they might be, and the difficulty of obtaining high-quality human reports.
“Our role here is not to resolve the nature of these events, but to provide guidance to NASA to provide a roadmap of how it can contribute to this area,” Spergel said.
The team sifted through available UAP data and found that many reports can be tied to known sources, such as distant aircraft, sensor artifacts, high-altitude balloons, or atmospheric events. However, when it comes to learning more about the persistently unidentifiable phenomena recorded, the team found the information lacking.
“Current data collection efforts related to UAPs are unsystematic and fragmented across agencies, often using instruments that are not calibrated for scientific data collection,” Spergel said. “Existing data and eyewitness accounts alone are insufficient to provide conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of each UAP event.”
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It’s possible that more direct, targeted observations of UAPs could help, using everything from FAA radar installations to sensors on commercial aircraft to government spy installations. But as Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), told the team, “Most people, including the government, don’t like it when I put our entire collection apparatus on your backyard.”
“We need to figure out how to do this only in the areas where I’m very confident there will be something,” Kirkpatrick continued, “and I’m very confident I’m not going to break any laws.”
While AARO may be dealing with some classified UAP data, the NASA team is only working with unclassified information so the report can be made fully public. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the data NASA has to work with is inferior to the Department of Defense’s information — often the classification of a UAP sighting has nothing to do with UAPs, according to Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and anything related to what made the photo.
“Observations of unidentified anomalous phenomena themselves are not classified. It’s often the sensor platform that gets classified,” she said, to prevent foreign adversaries from understanding that sensor’s capabilities. “If a fighter jet has taken a photo of the Statue of Liberty, that image is classified not because of the subject in the photo, but because of the sensors on the plane.”
However, there are drawbacks for the NASA researchers who work in public. While not specifying exactly what happened, Evans noted that members of the research team “have been subjected to online abuse because of their decision to participate in this panel,” adding that “any form of harassment towards our panelists is merely serves to undermine the scientific process, which requires an environment of respect and openness.”
Harassment of NASA research team members also highlights another problem with seriously studying UAPs, according to Spergel: the stigma associated with reporting a UAP sighting, especially among some professionals. “Despite NASA’s extensive efforts to reduce stigma, the origins of the UAPs remain unclear and we feel that many events go unreported,” he said. “Commercial pilots, for example, are very reluctant to report anomalies, and one of our goals for NASA to play a role is to remove stigma and get high-quality data.”