UFO panelists say online abuse is aimed at their work to investigate the unexplained.
NASA has held its first public meeting on UFOs – officially referred to as “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs) – a year after launching an investigation into unexplained sightings.
The space agency broadcast the four-hour hearing on Wednesday with an independent panel of experts who pledged to be transparent. The team of 16 scientists and other experts selected by NASA included retired American astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent nearly a year in space.
NASA said the focus of the public session at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., was to hold “final deliberations” before the team issues a report, which panel chair David Spergel said would be released at the end of July.
“If I had to sum up what I think we’ve learned in one line, it’s that we need high-quality data,” Spergel said in the opening speech on Wednesday.
NOW: An audio-only media briefing following today’s public discussion of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs. https://t.co/y4gMK6n1M9
— NASA (@NASA) May 31, 2023
“Current data collection efforts on UAPs are unsystematic and fragmented across agencies, often using instruments that are not calibrated for scientific data collection,” Spergel said.
The team has “several months of work ahead of it,” said Dan Evans, a senior research officer in NASA’s science unit, adding that panelists have been victims of online abuse and harassment since they began their work.
The panel represents the first investigation ever conducted under the auspices of the US space agency on a subject the government has ever entrusted to the exclusive and secret purview of military and national security officials.
The NASA study is separate from a newly formalized Pentagon-based investigation of unidentified aerial phenomena documented in recent years by military pilots and analyzed by US defense and intelligence officials.
The parallel efforts of NASA and the Pentagon, both undertaken with some semblance of public scrutiny, highlight a turning point for the US government after decades spent deducing, debunking and discrediting sightings of unidentified flying objects – long associated with notions of flying saucers and aliens – dating back to the 1940s.
Although NASA’s science mission was seen by some as a promising approach to the subject with a more open mind, the US space agency said from the start that it would not jump to conclusions.
“There is no evidence that UAPs are of extraterrestrial origin,” NASA said last June when announcing the formation of the panel.
“I want to stress this loud and proud: There is absolutely no compelling evidence for extraterrestrial life associated with ‘unidentified objects,'” panelist Evans said Wednesday after the meeting.
U.S. defense officials have said the Pentagon’s recent effort to investigate such sightings has led to hundreds of new reports now being investigated, though most remain unexplained.
The head of the Pentagon’s newly formed All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has also said that the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life has not been ruled out, but that no sightings have provided evidence of extraterrestrial origin.
NASA’s Evans pointed out that the livestream of the meeting led to many trolls.
This is in addition to ‘online abuse’ towards several committee members.
Harassment detracts from the scientific process and reinforces the stigma surrounding the topic of UAPs, Evans said, adding that NASA security is addressing the issue.
“It is precisely this rigorous fact-based approach that makes it possible to separate fact from fiction,” he added.