"The existing data, and witness presentations, are insufficient to provide conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of each event," said David Spergel, an astrophysicist in charge of chairing this work. "We need high-quality data."

A report is due to be published during the summer, detailing how to achieve this.

NASA announced last year the launch of this work on unidentified flying objects, and appointed in October no less than 16 experts to lead them. Among them, eminent scientists, but also officials of the American regulator of civil aviation (FAA), or former astronaut Scott Kelly.

Their purpose is not to review one by one the events observed in the past in an attempt to explain them. It is to make recommendations to NASA on how to study them rigorously in the future.

The subject is very serious, stressed the American space agency: it concerns both national security and that of air traffic.

But it also arouses a strong interest because of the word UFO, very connoted. The official term has also been replaced by "unidentified anomalous phenomena".

"At present, we have no explicit data to suggest that there is a connection between unidentified anomalous phenomena and extraterrestrial life," said David Grinspoon, one of the scientists on the panel.

For David Spergel, the difficulty of tackling this question lies in the fact that some "are convinced of the existence of UFOs", while at the opposite extreme, others find the subject "ridiculous".

Nicola Fox, Associate Administrator at NASA, opened the session by condemning the online harassment of panel members.

Transparency

Some 800 unidentified aerial phenomena have been collected, Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Department of Defense's Office of Defense (AARO), said Wednesday. But "maybe between 2% and 5%" are "really abnormal," he said.

He screened two videos. A first showed a spherical object seen in the Middle East in 2022, still unexplained to this day.

A second video showed three dots seeming to move back and forth in an enigmatic way. These were actually planes in an air corridor, whose back and forth movements were caused by oscillations of the sensor itself, he explained.

The meeting, which lasted several hours on Wednesday, was broadcast live on the internet, and a portion was dedicated to questions from the public.

This transparency is highlighted by the American space agency, which stresses the need to "de-stigmatize" the subject.

The panel's work is based solely on public data, so that it can be discussed freely and accessible to all, said Daniel Evans, in charge of coordinating the study for NASA.

Astrophysicist David Spergel added that classified information -- not taken into account here -- was often not because of the object observed, but rather not to reveal certain characteristics of the devices that captured the image (fighter jets...).

In the future, observations will have to be collected by specific, multiple and well-calibrated instruments, he said. However, he dismissed the idea of a dedicated satellite.

Instead, the recommendations will likely include avenues to better incorporate public input. The billions of mobile phones on Earth can provide useful data, especially if multiple images are taken simultaneously.

Mike Gold, a former NASA official on the panel, advocated for the creation of a dedicated office within the space agency.

But ultimately, what do we hope to discover? Perhaps new physical phenomena, some experts have suggested.

According to David Grinspoon, "If NASA applies the same methodological rigor to the study of unidentified anomalous phenomena as it does to that of possible extraterrestrial life, then we will be in a position to learn something new and interesting, whatever the final explanation."

© 2023 AFP