Nasa’s first UFOs meeting: What happened in Washington?

On May 31, Nasa held a four-hour panel discussion, the first public meeting to address the findings of a group investigating possible signs of life beyond Earth.

The UAP Independent Study Team comprises 16 panel members, including a former astronaut, an oceanographer, aviation experts, and a physics professor. You can watch the entire four-hour discussion on YouTube.

The group’s aim is to look into the investigation of UAPs, unexplained aerial phenomena, the term preferred to the more stigmatising UFOs.  That stigma was one of the key themes of the panel discussion.

“This is hard work, it’s serious work. If we are truly to respect the sanctity of the scientific process, then we need to allow science indeed to be free, and that freedom stems directly from an absence of harassment,” said David Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research at Nasa’s Science Mission Directorate.

Are UFOs real?

But have there been any signs of aliens?

Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, who is director of the US Department of Defence’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) says his department has dealt with 800 reports of sightings but that only a tiny fraction of them meet the criteria to be labelled “anomalous”.

The group’s chair, David Spergel, says, “The search for life is a really important thing. We haven’t found life beyond Earth yet.

“To make the claim that we see something that is evidence of non-human intelligence? We have not seen that.”

Countering fake UFO reports

Drones are a significant confounding factor in the reporting of UAPs. Spergel describes drones as a “large, growing, and will be a continuous source of confusion.”

There are “over 871,000 drones registered with the FAA,” according to the US Federal Aviation Administration website. Drones below 250g do not have to be registered in either the US or UK, and there are many millions more of these.

“We need more uniform data,” says Spergel.

Redwire chief growth officer Mike Gold describes the issue as not even knowing what you are looking for, when researching UAPs.

“We’re not looking for a needle in a haystack, we’re looking for an anomaly in a haystack,” says Gold. “We don’t even know that we’re looking for a needle.”

What causes UFO sightings?

Two of the key sources identified for UAP reports, other than drones and commercial planes, are huge explosions happening at “cosmological distances”, and “sprites”.

The latter is caused by lightning that rises upwards, discharging into the mesosphere rather than connecting with the ground. “Sprite lightning” is one Google image search you don’t want to miss.

There were no major revelations during the four-hour panel session, then, but part of its role was to assess the process of UAP study rather than to dig into recent claims of UFOs darting across the sky.

A final report on the findings is due to be published in July.