Douglas Jones
Is it a UFO or just an aircraft? An expert explains on Capitol Hill
An official said the division examining UAPs is looking into 650 instances, but "no credible evidence" has been found of extraterrestrial activity.
LEARN MOREPosted: 7:43 p.m. EDT May 31, 2023
A NASA panel held a public meeting to examine hundreds of reports of unidentified flying objects and give feedback on which could not be explained.
The panel detailed some of the main characteristics given in the hundreds of reports that people used to detail what they saw in the UFO sightings.
Those characteristics often included that the objects were usually small or round in shape and size, and they often appeared silver or translucent or white.
Reports said they usually appeared to be flying at about 10,000 to 30,000 feet above the ground, and others noticed that the objects appeared to fly past at Mach 2 speed, while others appeared to be stationary.
Reports said the objects appeared to have no exhaust as a sign of how the object's propulsion functioned.
These accounts were often single-sourced, and there were generally no reliable tools being used to measure the data given in the reports.
One NASA panel member said that when they started there were about 650 reports of UFOs, which have now grown to over 800 reported sightings.
While NASA admitted that the agency wasn't at a point where they could conclusively say these objects were not coming from outer space, experts said there was not complete certainty on what some of them were, or their origins.
Sean Kirkpatrick, director of NASA's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, said, "We have 50 to 100-ish new reports each month."He said 2% to 5% of the total database of sightings are "possibly really anomalous."
In 2021 the Pentagon said of 144 sightings made by military pilots since 2004, all but one was still unexplained.
NASA says that privacy laws limit how much the agency can investigate and said that while its technology is powerful, there are still limitations on how it can collect data from Americans.
Commercial pilots are also hesitant to report sightings, NASA believes. NASA said it is trying to remove any stigma around reporting UFO sightings so that people don't feel they are being seen in a negative light by reporting them. The agency said some scientists have faced online harassment for their efforts to investigate UFO sightings.
