NASA panel: No convincing evidence for extraterrestrial life connected with UAPs

On Wednesday, members of the NASA advisory board tasked with studying unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) held its first public meeting, debuting its plan for how it would proceed with a report it is scheduled to write this year. Among many topics discussed, several of its members (and NASA officials) stressed that they were not specifically undertaking a hunt for aliens.

"I want to emphasize this loud and proud that there is absolutely no convincing evidence for extraterrestrial life associated with UAPs," said Dan Evans, the assistant deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Evans is responsible for orchestrating the study on UAP.

During the four-hour meeting, which was livestreamed on the web, the team said that insufficient data and stigma about the topic remain significant barriers to uncovering the nature of UAPs. Panel chairman David Spergel remarked that the team's role was "not to resolve the nature of these events" but to create a road map for NASA that could potentially guide future inquiries into the topic.

NASA formed the UAP team in 2022 with 16 experts in scientific disciplines like physics and astrobiology to investigate "observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or as known natural phenomena."

In decades prior, unexplained objects in the sky were officially referred to as UFOs (unidentified flying objects). But US officials later changed the initialism to "UAP," meaning "unidentified aerial phenomena," to avoid some of the sci-fi stigma associated with the UFO term. In the past year, the US government redefined the "A" in UAP to mean "anomalous" and expanded the definition to include phenomena that might occur underwater or in space.

Public interest in UFOs has spiked in recent years due to leaks of US Navy videos, high-profile articles in The New York Times, and coverage of a 2004 incident by 60 Minutes. The new round of UFO mania resulted in many high-ranking US government officials, including former President Obama, making public remarks about the unusual nature of unknown objects apparently flying in US airspace.

NASA's civilian panel marks a departure from previous government approaches, which historically placed the investigation of UAP under military or national security control. Unlike the Pentagon's ongoing study of UAP sightings reported by military aviators, the NASA panel is solely scrutinizing unclassified reports from civilian observers.

“We don’t even know what we’re supposed to monitor”

A recurring issue during Wednesday's NASA meeting was that the UAP panel members do not know exactly what they are looking for. In one exchange during the session, after debating the nature of sensors necessary to observe UAPs accurately, several members described their frustration with attempting to study ill-defined phenomena.

"I think we're not looking for a needle in a haystack, we're looking for an anomaly in a haystack. We don't even know that we're looking for a needle," said Mike Gold, the executive vice president of Civil Space and External Affairs at Redwire.

Gold went on, "I don't know what the phenomenology is that we're looking for. We say 'anomalous'—what does that mean? Anomalous acceleration? I think as we try to look at the data, we're starting from an almost impossible position if we don't know what we're looking for. Is it a radiation signature? Is it something electromagnetic? Is it something like that? [That's] why this is so challenging and frustrating to me that we're talking about monitoring something that we don't even know what we're supposed to monitor."

"You're right, we don't know exactly what we're looking for," agreed Jen Buss, CEO of the Potomac Institute of Policy Studies. Still, some team members expressed optimism that the scientific method and the development of new observational techniques could cover unexpected discoveries in the UAP space.

But wrangling the scope and definition of UAP is only one of the challenges they face. Lamenting the poor quality of UAP sighting data—especially the preponderance of potential optical illusions and misconceptions—was a common theme during the meeting.

At one point, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office in the US Department of Defense, presented a video of three objects reported as UAP by a pilot. The ADARO office later determined that the three objects seen in the video were commercial aircraft that were much farther away than anticipated by the people who made the sighting.

Later in the meeting, Joshua Semeter of Boston University presented slides related to a famous Navy video popularly called "Go Fast." The slides showed how one could use the data on-screen in the video and trigonometry to calculate that the target object was actually traveling at 40 mph, which was about wind speed at the time. He described that the object's apparent speed on the video is due to a combination of parallax effects, such as zooming in on an object that is 13,000 feet above the ocean's surface. Shortly thereafter, former astronaut Scott Kelly stood up and recounted a story about the time his RIO jet co-pilot saw a UFO that turned out to be a Bart Simpson balloon.

Kelly's comment got chuckles from the panel, but the moment highlighted the challenges the panel faces regarding stigma. During the session, the issue of societal taboos around UFOs also came up. Despite the Pentagon encouraging military aviators to document UAP events, many commercial pilots still hesitate to report them. In addition, several panelists previously reported instances of online abuse and harassment, triggering comments from NASA's science chief, Nicola Fox, who expressed disappointment. "Harassment only leads to further stigmatization," she said.

Much like the public's perception of artificial intelligence from popular media, it is very difficult to separate public perception of the UAP topic from a century's worth of science fiction related to visitors from other worlds. Aside from a lack of data and the fact that unknown objects are unknown because key data about them does not exist, stigma is likely the biggest albatross that the panel carries as it attempts to complete its mission.

And to be clear, although the possibility of extraterrestrial life hasn't been ruled out, Spergel did his best to dampen the public's expectations that NASA might discover aliens visiting Earth: "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."