Washington — An independent group of scientists and experts convened by NASA to study unidentified anomalous phenomena, known as UAPs or UFOs, stressed the need for better data about the encounters in its first and only public meeting Wednesday, exploring how the space agency can assist efforts to understand the mysterious events.
NASA defines UAPs as "observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective." Hundreds of military and commercial pilots have reported observing unusual objects traveling at high speeds with seemingly no propulsion mechanism, confounding scientists and military analysts who have struggled to explain their origins.
The 16-member NASA study group was formed last October to "lay the groundwork for future study on the nature of UAPs for NASA and other organizations," the agency said at the time. The team's investigation relies solely on unclassified material from the government and private sector. The group is set to release a report detailing the findings of its nine-month investigation later this summer.
David Spergel, an astrophysicist and the group's chairman, opened Wednesday's four-hour meeting by highlighting the need for more high-quality data about UAPs from the government and commercial sector. The group was tasked with giving NASA "guidance to provide a roadmap to how it can contribute in this area," rather than explaining past events, Spergel noted.
"The current data collection efforts regarding UAPs are unsystematic and fragmented across various agencies, often using instruments uncalibrated for scientific data collection," Spergel said. "To understand UAP better, targeted data collection, thorough data curation and robust analyses are needed. Such an approach will help to discern unexplained UAP sightings, but even then there's no guarantee that all sightings will be explained."
The issue of UAPs has gained more attention from the military and lawmakers in recent years with the release of numerous videos of military aviators' encounters with the objects. Last year, the Defense Department established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in coordination with the intelligence community to spearhead the government's investigations into UAPs.
Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of AARO, said at Wednesday's meeting that the majority of the reports the task force has examined have mundane explanations. Many of those cases technically remain "unresolved" due to a lack of data about the encounters, Kirkpatrick said, echoing Spergel's comments that better data collection is needed to understand the events.
Kirkpatrick said AARO has received about 800 reports in total, up from about 650 when he testified before Congress last month. He said that cases with signals that could be considered "anomalous" make up between 2% to 5% of all reports. The objects are typically between 1 and 4 meters long and are observed between 10,000 and 30,000 feet.
The AARO chief laid out steps NASA could take to help better understand the UAPs, including by standardizing how crowd-sourced reports are collected, exploring the use of ground-based instruments to monitor for the objects and evaluating whether satellites could be used for detection.
After hearing from Kirkpatrick and Mike Freie, an official from the Federal Aviation Administration, the panel's members offered several presentations detailing how their specific expertise applied to the team's mandate. The group discussed the difficulty in categorizing UAPs and determining which cases should qualify as "anomalous" in the first place.
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