Five revelations from NASA’s public UFO meeting

The first-ever public meeting of NASA’s “independent study group” on UFOs dropped major revelations about unexplained objects being tracked “around the world.”

It also included serious calls for more resources to investigate UFOs, now more technically described as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) to better encompass the range of sightings and cases investigated.

Comprised of 16 experts ranging from physicists to astronauts, NASA’s study group had a lot to say during their four-hour meeting, which covered everything from the search for alien artifacts to the problem of online harassment by UFO trolls.

The study group, the first of its kind from the US space agency, has been conducting its work since last June and is expected to announce their final recommendations to NASA by the end of July.

Here are the top five takeaways from yesterday’s meeting.

Serious scientists want to look for alien technology in our solar system

“There is a widespread, but by no means universal, belief within the scientific community that extraterrestrial civilizations exist,” astrobiologist David Grinspoon told his fellow UAP task force members.

“The same rationale that supports the idea that alien civilizations can exist and be detectable,” Grinspoon said, “also supports the idea that finding alien artifacts in our own solar system is at least plausible.”

Grinspoon, who has served as a consultant to NASA on space exploration strategies in the past, then recommended that the space agency take the lead in searching for these extraterrestrial artifacts, if they’re out there.

“Most of the solar system has not been searched for artifacts and anomalies,” he noted, noting, “NASA is the leading agency for solar system exploration.”

“These modest data analysis efforts could potentially be applied to existing and planned planetary missions,” Grinspoon said.

This wasn’t the first time Grinspoon has advocated hunting alien “technosignatures” within our solar system or even our own planet, calling dismissive attitudes to the idea “intellectually lazy.”

“Our fledgling civilization has already launched five spacecraft that will roam the galaxy, and we’re trying to figure out how to send small spacecraft to nearby exoplanets,” Grinspoon wrote earlier this year. Sky & Telescope.

“Imagine what an antiquated ET civilization would have achieved and what machines would have invaded our solar system in billions of years.”

“If NASA applies the same rigorous methodology to UAPs that it applies to the study of possible life elsewhere, then we stand to learn something new and interesting.”

The percentage of unsolved UAP cases remains consistent with the past

The director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), physicist Sean Kirkpatrick, told NASA’s UAP group that the number of military UAP sightings his group would classify as “possibly truly anomalous” is somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of AARO’s total. database.

That rate is remarkably consistent with previous rates for unsolved UFO and UAP cases, including that of the Pentagon’s Cold War UFO bureau, Project Blue Book, which ran until about 4 and 5.9 percent in the 1950s.

Astronomers surveyed in 1977 by Stanford professor of astrophysics Peter Sturrock, 2,611 members of the American Astronomical Society, resulted in a similar statistic: 62 astronomers out of 1,356 respondents, or 4.6 percent reported witnessing or recording unexplained aerial phenomena.

Some academic scientists, including SUNY Albany physicist Kevin Knuth, have suggested that this consistency could suggest that the phenomenon is likely real and not just random noise.

Kirkpatrick replayed an example of an unsolved UAP case videotaped by a US military MQ-9 Reaper drone in the Middle East from last year displaying a bizarre flying metallic orb.

“This is a typical example of what we see the most,” Kirkpatrick told NASA’s UAP panel. “We see them all over the world.”

“And we see these making very interesting apparent maneuvers,” Kirkpatrick added. “This one in particular, however, I would like to point out, exhibited no puzzling technical capabilities and posed no threat to air safety.”

“It will take time to come to a conclusion,” he said, “until we can get better resolved data on similar objects on which to do a larger analysis.”

The infamous ‘GOFAST’ UAP was not fast at all

As one of the pilots shouts in the infrared targeting video of the mysterious ‘GOFAST’ UFO: ‘Whoa! Understood!’

Josh Semeter, one of NASA’s panelists, an engineering professor at Boston University’s Center for Space Physics, presented a detailed analysis of a fighter jet’s trajectory relative to the “GOFAST” UAP.

It turned out that the mysterious object was, in fact, traveling at about 40 mph.

“So that’s a speed consistent with winds at 13,000 feet,” Semeter said, noting that this was the calculated height for the GOFAST UAP.

Making such a compelling argument that the GOFAST was likely an object sailing in a strong breeze was possible, he noted, because of the infrared video’s technical readout and interface.

‘Fortunately, the information needed to determine the height and speed of this object is on the screen,’ explains Semeter.

Online harassment has plagued NASA’s UAP panel

Several members of the team referenced abuses by UFO trolls, cantankerous skeptics and others both online and within their own institutions during NASA’s four-hour public meeting.

“It’s really disheartening to hear about the harassment our panelists have faced online, all because they study this topic,” said Nicky Fox, the associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

“NASA stands with our panelists and we will not tolerate abuse,” she added.

“Harassment only leads to further stigmatization of the UAP field, significantly hindering scientific progress and discouraging others from studying this important topic.”

Daniel Evans, also of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, assured the panel that “NASA’s security team is actively addressing this issue.”

NASA’s panel wants the tools to seriously study UAP

Former senior NASA official Mike Gold, now an executive vice president at the private aerospace company Redwire, voiced his opinion that NASA should set up a permanent office for the study of UAP, and his colleagues sounded no less serious.

A recurring theme of the public meeting was the need for higher quality data, not just from UAP cases, but more data from the much more mundane things that could be mistaken for truly unusual phenomena.

Panel member and astronomer Federica Bianco pointed out that UAP researchers “need a thorough and deep understanding of what’s normal to sort out what’s unusual.”

The study group’s chair, astrophysicist David Spergel, repeatedly stressed the need for better data collection equipment and methods, if NASA or any other research organization is to successfully address the UAP problem.

“If I were to summarize what we’ve learned in one month, we need high-quality data,” said Spergel, who has devoted much of his professional life to teasing meaning out of faint signals deep from the universe.

‘The lesson of my career is that you want to answer important questions with high-quality data and well-calibrated instruments.’