Key takeaways from the space agency’s first televised “unidentified anomalous phenomena” meeting.
By Elisha Sauers  on June 3, 2023
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A mysterious sighting in the sky was dubbed a UFO in the 1980s. Credit: P. Wallick / Classicstock / Getty Images

After decades of shrugging off UFO sightings, NASA has shifted from chief debunker of extraterrestrials to taking its first steps to formally investigate these mysteries of the sky.

The U.S. space agency held a public meeting of the unidentified anomalous phenomena study team, an independent panel of 16 experts charged with addressing the many unexplained reports of glowing orbs, darting dashes and dots, and bloops that seem to transmute into more bloops. Scott Kelly, a former astronaut who spent about a year in space, is among the members.

Members of the team emphasized that they have no convincing evidence that anything weird reported from the sky is actually aliens. NASA chose to broadcast the meeting Wednesday, May 31, 2023, as a show of transparency — an effort to combat long-held beliefs that the government is hiding “the truth” about space visitors.

“Science is built on evidence. It thrives on scrutiny, it demands reproducibility, and above all, objectivity,” said Dan Evans, NASA assistant deputy associate administrator for science research. “From a scientific perspective, we do not come in with an agenda. We come in needing a roadmap.”

But in case you didn’t have four hours to spare in the middle of a workweek for the meeting, Mashable has distilled the key takeaways.

What are UAP, and why isn’t NASA calling them UFOs?
Most Americans know these strange sightings in the sky as UFOs, short for unidentified flying objects, defined as things that can’t be immediately explained as a natural occurrence or an aircraft. But the study team is using a new acronym: UAP.

Members of the panel said the Pentagon likely adopted “UAP” to put distance between the topic and the stigma that comes with UFOs, often stereotyped as delusions of alien encounters. Old Hollywood ran with the idea and put flying saucers in a plethora of sci-fi films.

The acronym UAP used to stand for unidentified aerial phenomena, but the National Defense Authorization Act, signed into federal law in December, changed the A to represent “anomalous.” The purpose was to also capture strange sightings on the ground and under water. But, given that the majority of UAP reported to date have been in the air, the NASA panel will focus on airspace.

Why is it hard for NASA to study UAP?
The study team members emphasized that their biggest challenge to studying UAP is the stigma. Anecdotally, some said commercial pilots are reluctant to report strange sightings to authorities: Less reporting leads to sparse data.

Moving forward with NASA’s involvement has its problems, said David Spergel, an astrophysicist and chairman of the study team, describing two staunch camps: one convinced weird stuff happens in the sky that defies physics and technology all the time, and another convinced that everything is explainable and there’s no value in looking into it.

“You have a community out there that says the haystack is filled with gold, and another community saying it’s nuts to look in a haystack for anything interesting — there’s nothing there,” Spergel said after the meeting to reporters.