Revelations Ahead! NASA panel investigating UFOs holds first public meeting

The task force was formed last year to collect all the available data on ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena’ (UAPs) – defined as sightings that couldn’t immediately be attributed to a known natural occurrence or an aircraft.

One of the main takeaways from the public meeting was our data collection was simply not large enough to identify and explain UAPs.

According to David Spergel, who leads the group, our data collection efforts about UAPs are currently unsystematic and fragmented across numerous different agencies, often taking the help of instruments uncalibrated for scientific data collection.

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena have rarely been studied with thoroughness, historically. And all the data has never been accumulated in one place.

But now that the task force has gathered the data, scientists can start taking a closer look at each sighting and try figuring out what UAPs are.

A number of members emphasised that so far, there is no evidence that any UAP has anything to do with any extraterrestrial object.

Instead, the sightings the scientists have been able to look into detail have numerous mundane objects – such as balloons, commercial aircraft, and even signals from a microwave oven – as their sources.

The 16 members of the NASA panel include physicists, technologists, astrobiologists, astronomers, and even an astronaut – Scott Kelly, who devoted a long time to NASA’s landmark Twin Study, spending a year on the International Space Station (ISS).

Once investigated, less than 5% of reported events remained unexplained, largely because we don’t have enough details on them.

In a press call after the public meeting, Federica Bianco at the University of Delaware said it’s quite possible that with better data the remaining UAPs would be “reconciled with known phenomena”.

The group is expected to release an elaborate report in late July.