%20(1).png)
NASA panel established last year to investigate what the government refers to as "unidentified aerial phenomena," or UFOs, was set to have its first public meeting on Wednesday, ahead of a report expected in the coming weeks.
The 16-member panel, including of professionals from physics to astrobiology, was created last June to investigate unclassified UFO encounters and other material gathered from civilian government and business sectors.
The goal of Wednesday's four-hour public meeting is "to hold final deliberations before the agency's independent study team publishes a report this summer," according to NASA's announcement of the meeting.
The panel is the first of its kind under the aegis of the US space agency for a subject that the government had hitherto relegated to the exclusive and covert domain of military and national security authorities.
The NASA probe is distinct from a newly established Pentagon-based examination of unexplained aerial phenomena, or UAPs, which have been reported by military aviators and investigated by US defence and intelligence authorities in recent years.
The concurrent NASA and Pentagon activities — both performed with some semblance of public scrutiny — mark a watershed moment in the government's decades-long campaign to divert, deny, and discredit reports of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, dating back to the 1940s.
The name "UFOs," which has long been linked with flying saucers and aliens, has been supplanted in government terminology with "UAP."
While some saw NASA's science mission as promising a more open-minded approach to a topic long considered taboo by the defence establishment, the US space agency made it clear from the start that it was not jumping to any conclusions.
"There is no evidence that UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin," NASA stated when the group was formed last June.
In later pronouncements, the CIA added a further possible twist to the UAP term, referring to it as an abbreviation for "unidentified anomalous phenomena." This stated that sightings that did not appear to be flying may be included.
In announcing the conference on Wednesday, NASA stated that UAPs are "observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective."
According to US defence sources, the Pentagon's current campaign to examine such sightings has resulted in hundreds of fresh claims that are being investigated, albeit the most majority remain classified as unexplained.
The head of the Pentagon's newly established All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has stated that while the presence of intelligent alien life cannot be ruled out, no sightings have generated proof of extraterrestrial origins.