NASA UFO panel says stigma, lack of data are problems when studying 'unidentified aerial phenomena' | CBC Newshttps://www.cbc.ca/news/science/nasa-ufo-uap-panel-1.6860719NASA 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.
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this suggests a significant negative stigma associated with reporting or even researching such phenomenon. That said, by encouraging military aviators to disclose anomalies that they've seen or detected, the Department of Defence is receiving many more reports."
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"I think the fact that NASA has called us together here as a panel to look into this, that NASA is hosting a public meeting, that we've heard, clearly stated, we're here to be transparent — I think that's the first step in trying to really normalize the study of UAPs," Toner said.
Panel officials on Wednesday, having relied on unclassified data sensors, indicated they have run into much of the same obstacles as their Pentagon counterparts in studying unidentified objects.
"The current data collection efforts about UAPs are unsystematic and fragmented across various agencies, often using instruments uncalibrated for scientific data collection," Spergel said.
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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 — long associated with notions of flying saucers and aliens — dating back to the 1940s.