Here’s what NASA has revealed about UFOs
Yesterday the NASA committee that deals with UFO observations held its first public meeting. The scarcity of high-quality data is among the biggest obstacles to unraveling such mysteries
After spending decades debunking UFO sightings, NASA has changed its tune.
Last October, the American space agency convened a commission on the so-called "unidentified aerial phenomena" (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, Uap). That is, what were once called UFOs, events in the sky that are not attributable to aircraft or known natural phenomena.
On 24 October, the commission of 16 experts started work on an independent nine-month study. In the panel also the Italian astrophysicist Federica Bianco of the University of Delaware (USA).
And yesterday NASA's independent group convened a public meeting to present preliminary findings before the release of a report expected later this summer.
"The work of this committee represents the first UFO investigation ever conducted under the auspices of the US space agency on a subject that the government once entrusted to the exclusive and secret competence of military and national security officials," Reuters said.
And while there has always been widespread public interest in the subject, NASA researchers believe that UAPs are underestimated due to the "stigma" associated with them. While the Pentagon has encouraged military aviators to document UAP events in recent years, commercial pilots remain "very reluctant to report them" because of the lingering stigma surrounding such sightings, panel chairman, astrophysicist David Spergel, said.
All the details.
COLLECTING HIGH-QUALITY DATA THE MAJOR CHALLENGE FOR NASA ON UFOS
Whether you still call them Ufos or Uap unidentified aerial phenomena, at the moment the only certainty is that higher quality data are needed to study these sightings.
“If I had to sum up in one line what I feel we've learned, it's that we need high-quality data,” Spergel said. "Current existing data and eyewitness reports alone are not sufficient to provide conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of each UAP event."
The biggest challenge is the lack of scientifically reliable methods for documenting UFOs.
According to NASA panel members, the underlying problem is that the phenomena in question are generally detected and recorded with cameras, sensors and other equipment that are not designed or calibrated to observe and accurately measure these peculiarities.
THE OBJECTIVE OF THE PANEL
After that, panel chair Spergel explained to the audience that his team's role was not to "resolve the nature of these events," rather to provide NASA with a "roadmap" to guide future analysis, adding that their report on the sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) will be published in July.
THE SEPARATE INVESTIGATION OF THE PENTAGON
It should also be added that the NASA study is separate from a recently formalized investigation by the Pentagon of sightings reported by military aviators in recent years and analyzed by US defense and intelligence officials.
"We get 50 to 100 new reports every month," said Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Pentagon's new All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The US military has documented more than 800 cases over the past two decades, Kirkpatrick added.
But only a small percentage are considered beyond a relatively simple explanation, while the rest can be attributed to phenomena such as aircraft, balloons, debris or atmospheric causes, says the AARO director.
CHANGE OF STEP
The parallel efforts by NASA and the Department of Defense highlight a turning point for the US government after decades of deflecting, debunking and discrediting reports of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, dating back to the 1940s, Reuters said.
So now both NASA and the Pentagon openly address the issue, but both specify that the imperative remains to protect US airspace and, by extension, public and natural safety.
WHAT ABOUT EXTRATERRESTRIALS?
Finally, as the BBC reports, a Pentagon report in 2021 claims that out of 144 sightings of military pilots made since 2004, all but one have remained unexplained. Officials have not ruled out the possibility that the objects are extraterrestrial.
However, both NASA and defense intelligence officials have stressed that while the existence of intelligent alien life has not been ruled out, they have found no evidence to suggest an extraterrestrial origin for the UFO sightings.
"To claim that we see something that is evidence of non-human intelligence would require extraordinary evidence, and we haven't seen it," Spergel said.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/ecco-che-cosa-ha-rivelato-la-nasa-sugli-ufo/ on Thu, 01 Jun 2023 09:32:23 +0000.