NASA’s first public meeting on UAP

As we reported almost one year ago, Bill Nelson, administrator of NASA, instructed the aeronautics and space agency to study UAP. In his days as a Senator, he’d been briefed by US Navy pilots about anomalous encounters such as the USS Nimitz Tic Tac incident which many of us considered too real to ignore.

Two days ago, NASA held its first public meeting on UAP. Previously, for many decades, this well-known US government agency has distanced itself from the topic of UFOs. Bill Nelson’s leadership has changed this. Yes, it’s true that the majority of the 16 scientists on the independent panel convened by NASA are known to have previously expressed negative or dismissive opinions on the possibility of UFOs - which is hardly the open-minded approach that science ideally demands. But, nevertheless, they’re at the very least going through the motions of now studying the subject. And this is a first.

Credit: NASA

Most who listened to part or all of the hours-long public meeting seem to have been unimpressed, bored, or disappointed. They were never going to be wildly enthusiastic, failing to appreciate how those in the scientific field work. However, this is just the beginning. And the aim was only to conduct a preliminary study into how to study UAP.

“We steer between the rocks and the cyclone,” said panel chairman David Spergel, a widely respected astrophysicist. “We have a community of people who are completely convinced of the existence of UFOs. And we have a community of people who think addressing this question is ridiculous, everything can be explained.” He also made clear that his team's role was “not to resolve the nature of these events,” but rather to give NASA a “roadmap” to guide future analysis.

NASA officials said several members of the panel had been subjected to unspecified “online abuse” since beginning their work last year. “It is really disheartening to hear of the harassment that our panellists have faced online because they're studying this topic,” NASA's science chief, Nicola Fox, said in her opening remarks. “Harassment only leads to further stigmatisation of the UAP field, significantly hindering the scientific progress and discouraging others to study this important subject matter. Your harassment also obstructs the public's right to knowledge.”

The greatest challenge is a dearth of scientifically-reliable methods for documenting UFOs, typically sightings of what appear as objects moving in ways that defy the bounds of known technologies. The underlying problem, the panellists said, is that the phenomena in question are generally being detected and recorded with cameras, sensors, and other equipment not designed or calibrated to accurately observe and measure such peculiarities. “If I were to summarise in one line what I feel we've learned, it's we need high-quality data,” Spergel succinctly said. “The current existing data and eyewitness reports alone are insufficient to provide conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of every UAP event.”

The Galileo Project, headed by Avi Loeb of Harvard University, has been developing new instrumentation to attempt to photograph and otherwise record anomalous craft or probes in the skies. It’s challenging, taking time and considerable expertise.

The NASA UAP panellists also made clear that it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. Which is true. An extraterrestrial spacecraft has yet to land on the proverbial White House lawn - and for very good reasons.

Whilst the Pentagon in recent years has encouraged military aviators to document UAP events, many commercial pilots remain “very reluctant to report them due to the lingering stigma surrounding such sightings”, Spergel further commented.

The panel plans to issue a formal report in July. As for what might be recommended, Spergel offered one interesting possibility: a smartphone app that would allow users to collect and send valuable data.

“There are three to four billion cellphones in the world,” Spergel said. “Cellphones record not only images - we're all used to cellphone cameras - but they measure the local magnetic field; they’re gravitometers; they measure sound. They encode enormous amounts of information about the environment around them. If you have something seen by multiple cellphones, with good timestamp data, at multiple angles, you're able to infer the location and velocity of that object. Most of the time that will tell you it's a plane, it's a balloon, whatever. And if it's something novel, you have high-quality, uniformly selected data that could be used.”

The data could be combined with radar and information collected by other sensors to help “eliminate the normal” - leaving the true UAP for analysis with more detailed data than what's available now. “I think that's the way a number of us are thinking about how we might approach this,” Spergel added.

“We haven't seen any evidence that indicates that UAPs [sic] have anything to do with extraterrestrial phenomena,” David Grinspoon, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Houston, said. “If the data leads us to realise that it does, of course we'll be enthralled and fascinated by that and will want to pursue it. But at this point, we don't really have any explicit data that suggests there's a connection between UAPs [sic] and extraterrestrial life.”

“Within the scientific community, there is a widespread but by no means universal belief that there are extraterrestrial civilizations,” Grinspoon said. “The same rationale which supports the idea that ET civilizations may exist and may be detectable also supports the idea that finding extraterrestrial artifacts in our own solar system is at least plausible. NASA is the lead agency for solar system exploration. It already has an active program of detecting objects in our solar neighbourhood, using both ground-based and space-based facilities, and it could leverage those capabilities to search for objects in space with anomalous motion, anomalous trajectories, unusual light curves, anomalous spectral signatures, or other characteristics. If NASA applies the same rigorous methodology toward UAPs [sic] that it applies to the study of possible life elsewhere, then we stand to learn something new and interesting.”

As a side note, we’re always banging on about how you can say UFO (unidentified flying object), UFOs (unidentified flying objects), or UAP (unidentified aerial or anomalous phenomena) - but you cannot say UAPs because UAP already covers the plural. Exactness of thinking is essential. You could say UAPeas if a bunch of small, green vegetables - escaped from their pod or mothership - were observed moving oddly in the skies, but that’s the only exception we can think of. Anything other than that is just sloppiness - and those in science should especially know better than to be inexact, acting like sheep.

Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the DoD’s AARO, gave an overview of his office’s findings to date. He stated that 2-5% of UAP could be “possibly really anomalous”. Of note, Kirkpatrick revealed that the first “Five Eyes” meeting with his office on the UAP subject had taken place within the last few days. (For anyone who doesn’t already know, the “Five Eyes” is an intelligence alliance between the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.)

We think it’s sensible for scientists to be looking at current and future UAP incidents, rather than past cases. Data is absolutely crucial and rigorous analysis is imperative. Present means of observation are obviously insufficient, so new or adapted technological ways have to be identified and implemented. The aim must be to obtain conclusive proof, rather than bits and pieces of tantalising evidence. The scientific method must be appreciated and understood by everyone - admittedly, a huge ask. Why? Simply because it’s the best means we’ve got for determining the nature of reality.

Written by Victoria de las Heras & Iain Scott, 2nd June 2023