PENTAGON-BASED INVESTIGATION
The NASA study is separate from a newly formalised Pentagon-based investigation of sightings reported in recent years by military aviators and analysed by US defence and intelligence officials.
The US military has documented more than 800 cases over the past two decades, said Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s newly formed All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO.
But just a few per cent are considered beyond relatively simple explanation, while the rest can be attributed to mundane origins such as aircraft, balloons, debris or atmospheric causes, he said.
The parallel NASA and Pentagon efforts highlight a turning point for the government after decades spent deflecting, debunking and discrediting reports of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, dating back to the 1940s.
But in finally addressing the issue head-on, both NASA and the Pentagon have emphasised the imperative of protecting US airspace, and by extension public safety and natural security.
In a departure from the Pentagon, NASA’s panel is examining only unclassified reports from civilian observers, an approach Spergel said permits open sharing of information among scientific, commercial and international entities, as well as the public.
The term UFOs, long widely associated with notions of flying saucers and aliens, has been replaced in official government parlance by the abbreviation UAP.
Recent US law revised the UAP acronym, previously confined to “aerial” phenomena, to stand for “unidentified anomalous phenomena”, expanding the NASA study team’s research scope to include puzzling events in space or at sea.
Panel members said the majority of their work still focused on aerial phenomena.
Moreover, both NASA and defence-intelligence officials have stressed that while the existence of intelligent alien life has not been ruled out, they have found no evidence suggesting an extraterrestrial origin for UFO sightings.
“To make the claim that we see something that is evidence of non-human intelligence would require extraordinary evidence, and we have not seen that,” Spergel said.
Source: CNA
