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NASA Holds Public UFO Meeting

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FILE: On Thursday, June 9, 2022, NASA announced it is launching a study of UFOs as part of a new push toward high-risk, high-impact science, setting up an independent team to what information is publicly available on the matter and how much more is needed. Taken May 20, 2020.
FILE: On Thursday, June 9, 2022, NASA announced it is launching a study of UFOs as part of a new push toward high-risk, high-impact science, setting up an independent team to what information is publicly available on the matter and how much more is needed. Taken May 20, 2020.

UPDATED WITH MEETING DETAILS: WASHINGTON - The first public meeting of a NASA panel studying what the government calls "unidentified aerial phenomena," commonly known as UFOs, kicked off on Wednesday to discuss findings since its formation last year.

The panel represents the first such inquiry ever conducted under the auspices of the U.S. space agency for a subject the government once consigned to the exclusive and secretive purview of military and national security officials.

"If I were to summarize in one line what I feel we've learned, it's we need high quality data," said panel chair David Spergel during opening remarks.

The 16-member body, assembling experts from fields ranging from physics to astrobiology, was formed last June to examine unclassified UFO sightings and other data collected from civilian government and commercial sectors.

NASA said the focus of Wednesday's four-hour public session at the agency's headquarters in Washington was to hold "final deliberations" before the team publishes a report, which Spergel said was planned for release by late July.

The team has "several months of work ahead of them," said Dan Evans, a senior research official at NASA's science unit, adding that panel members had been subjected to online abuse and harassment since they began their work.

The NASA study is separate from a newly formalized Pentagon-based investigation of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, documented in recent years by military aviators and analyzed by U.S. defense and intelligence officials.

The parallel NASA and Pentagon efforts - both undertaken with some semblance of public scrutiny - highlight a turning point for the government after decades spent deflecting, debunking and discrediting sightings of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, dating back to the 1940s.

The term UFOs, long associated with notions of flying saucers and aliens, has been replaced in government parlance by "UAP."

While NASA's science mission was seen by some as promising a more open-minded approach to a topic long treated as taboo by the defense establishment, the U.S. space agency made it known from the start that it was hardly leaping to any conclusions.

"There is no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin," NASA said in announcing the panel's formation last June.

In its more recent statements, the agency presented a new potential wrinkle to the UAP acronym itself, referring to it as an abbreviation for "unidentified anomalous phenomena." This suggested that sightings other than those that appeared airborne may be included.

Still, NASA in announcing Wednesday's meeting, said the space agency defines UAPs "as observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective."

U.S. defense officials have said the Pentagon's recent push to investigate such sightings has led to hundreds of new reports that are under examination, though most remain categorized as unexplained.

The head of the Pentagon's newly formed All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has said the existence of intelligent alien life has not been ruled out but that no sighting had produced evidence of extraterrestrial origins.

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