NASA Panel to hold first public meeting on UFO Study

NASA Panel to hold first public meeting on UFO Study

In advance of a report that is anticipated in the coming weeks, a NASA panel established last year to investigate what the government refers to as "unidentified aerial phenomena," or UFOs, was scheduled to hold its first public meeting on Wednesday.

The 16-person group was established last June to look into unclassified UFO sightings and other information gathered from the civilian government and private sectors. Members of the group include experts in fields ranging from physics to astrobiology.

In its announcement of the meeting, NASA stated that the purpose of the four-hour public gathering on Wednesday was to "hold final discussions before the agency's independent study team publishes a report this summer."

The panel marks the first time a similar investigation has been carried out under the authority of the U.S. space agency for a topic that was previously kept under the sole and secret control of military and national security personnel.

The NASA project is distinct from a recently formalized Pentagon probe into unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, which military aviators have recently recorded and evaluated.

After decades of denying, disproving, and discrediting reports of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, dating back to the 1940s, the parallel NASA and Pentagon efforts—both performed with some semblance of public scrutiny—highlight a turning point for the government.

The acronym "UAP" has taken the place of the term "UFOs," which has long been used in official contexts to connote flying saucers and aliens.

Although some believed NASA's science mission would signal a shift in the defense establishment's long-held taboo attitude toward a subject, the American space agency was clear from the outset that it was not drawing any quick conclusions.

When the panel was announced by NASA in June of last year, it was said that there was "no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin."

In more recent pronouncements, the agency added a new potential twist to the UAP term by calling it an acronym for "unidentified anomalous phenomena." This gave the impression that sightings other than those that seemed to be in the air might be included.

However, NASA defined UAPs as "observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective" when announcing the meeting on Wednesday.

According to American defense sources, the Pentagon's current initiative to look into such sightings has generated hundreds of new claims that are being looked into, albeit the majority are still classified as unexplained.

The presence of intelligent alien life has not been ruled out, according to the chief of the Pentagon's newly established All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), but no sighting has yielded proof of extraterrestrial origins.