Spergel added that panel members have suggested ways to engage citizen scientists. “If it’s something that’s anomalous, that makes it interesting and worthy of study.” “I think this is one of the fascinating things about the UAP phenomenon,” Spergel said. Spergel pointed out that it ultimately took high-speed imaging data, often from orbital assets such as the International Space Station, to learn about the true nature of these intriguing ionospheric occurrences: they are essentially upward-moving discharges of lightning. Early on, to some extent, sprites were simply dismissed as illusory before being found as authentic, albeit very strange. Likewise, Spergel singled out sprites-mysterious sprawling flashes of light that commercial pilots have reported seeing above intense thunderstorms. I think there’s a number of interesting lessons learned there,” he said.
“Sometimes anomalies are really interesting and point to novel physical phenomenon. Instead further examination confirmed the bursts were cosmic in nature, emerging from astrophysical cataclysms scattered across the universe. When these brief, powerful blips were first seen in data from radio telescopes, many skeptics suspected they would be traced to mundane, terrestrial electromagnetic interference of one kind or another. Might there be riches untold awaiting anyone who successfully cracks the nature of UAP?Īt the meeting, Spergel said the history of fast radio bursts is instructive. But these events tend to be characterized by poor quality and limited data,” he added.
“That said, there remain events that we do not understand. Many of the UAP events can be attributed to commercial aircraft, drones and research balloons, as well as weather and ionospheric phenomena, Spergel stated. “NASA’s responsibility is to listen to our advice, take it seriously and then assess which aspects of it they want to follow,” Spergel said at the meeting. The group’s overall goal is to craft a where-to-go-from-here roadmap on how NASA can contribute to UAP studies, tapping its unique position as a civilian agency that handles data from the heavens and Earth alike in an open and transparent manner.
#Science phenomena based teaching archive
One idea already bandied about by the panel is a permanent office within NASA to collate and archive UAP information. At the outset of the May 31 meeting, Spergel set the tone: today’s existing data and eyewitness reports are insufficient to yield conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of every UAP event, he said, primarily because of a lack of quality control and poor data curation. But in a recent public briefing, it offered its first-cut verdict on ways to empirically grapple with the slippery subject of UAP.Īstrophysicist David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation and a professor emeritus at Princeton University, chairs the effort, which is officially called the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study. The team, which was convened last year, is continuing to work toward a report to be published later this summer. It may also require a better, sharper definition of what “anomalous” even means in the context of recent sightings.Īt least, that’s the emerging conclusion of a NASA-chartered, blue-ribbon panel of 16 independent experts who span a number of scientific and technical communities.
Gaining any new clarity about surging reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, will take time, better data gathering and diagnostic tools and, perhaps most importantly, a hale and hearty dose of nit-picking scientific scrutiny.
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