A NASA committee formed last year to study what the government calls “unidentified aerial phenomena,” commonly described as UFOs, is to hold its first public meeting today before drafting a report, the release of which is expected in the coming weeks.
This 16-member body, which includes experts from fields ranging from physics to astrobiology, was formed last June to review UFO sightings and other data collected by civilian sectors of government and commerce.
Today’s four-hour public meeting will focus “on final discussions before the agency’s independent research team releases a report this summer,” NASA said in announcing the meeting.
This commission is conducting the first such investigation ever conducted under the auspices of the US Space Agency into a matter that the administration once restricted to the exclusive and secret purview of military and national security officials.
The NASA study is separate from a new Pentagon investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), which have been documented in recent years by military jet pilots and analyzed by US defense and intelligence officials.
The parallel efforts by NASA and the Pentagon—both conducted with some public scrutiny—underscore an administration reversal after decades of dismissing reports of unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings dating back to the 1940s.
The term UFO, long associated with flying saucers and aliens, has been replaced in government jargon by the term UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).
While NASA’s science mission was seen by some as promising a more open approach to a subject long treated as taboo by the defense establishment, the US Space Agency made it clear from the start that it was not going to jump to conclusions.
“There is no evidence that UAPs are of extraterrestrial origin,” NASA said in announcing the panel’s formation last June.
In its most recent statements, the agency presented a potential change to the UAP acronym itself, referring to it as an abbreviation for “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.” This means that sightings other than those that seem to happen on air may be included.
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However, in announcing today’s meeting, NASA said it defines UAPs “as observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or as known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective.”
US defense officials have said the Pentagon’s recent effort to investigate such sightings has resulted in hundreds of new reports being investigated with most remaining unexplained.
The head of the Pentagon’s new All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has stated that the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life has not been ruled out, however none of the sightings of unidentified flying objects have provided evidence that they were of extraterrestrial origin.
