Nasa UFO report: Scientists reveal first-ever report on unidentified anomalous phenomena

... to The Independent’s live coverage of today’s UAP hearings at Nasa.

Nasa will be live streaming its panel today, on its own channels. They can be found on Nasa TV and the mobile app, as well as Nasa’s devoted live page.

It starts at 10am local pacific time.

The panel has a high-profile line-up – which includes Bill Nelson, the Nasa chief. Here’s the full rundown on who will appear today, from Nasa:

• NASA Administrator Bill Nelson
• Nicola Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington
• Dan Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate
• David Spergel, president, Simons Foundation and chair of NASA’s UAP independent study team

Nasa’s panel will be held amid the buzz created by hearings at Mexico’s Congress in which a journalist showed what he claimed were mummified alien corpses. Scientists have roundly rejected the claims.

We probably won’t get any of that from Nasa today. Their hearing is expected to be a much more subdued, scientific and forward-looking affair.

The US is very into UFOs at the moment – partly because of more legitimate and scientific investigations like Nasa’s project on unidentified aerial phenomena, but partly because of more speculative things.

Here’s a fun example of the latter. A Las Vegas family claims they have seen UFOs land in their backyard – and have released drawings of them.

Full story here.

Nasa has held public meetings about UAPs before. In summer, the group behind the upcoming report held a public briefing about what they had found so far.

For the most part, those involved stressed that they had been receiving sustained abuse, and that it had been making their work difficult.

“Harassment only leads to further stigmatisation of the UAP field, significantly hindering the scientific progress and discouraging others to study this important subject matter,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate said then.

Here’s the full story from that meeting.

Nasa has taken to calling unexplained objects in the sky “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena”, or UAPs, rather than UFOs. It says that it does so to be consistent with the National Defense Authorization Act, though the initialism has been more generally adopted because it avoids much of the difficult baggage of unidentified flying object, or UFO.

It defines them as “observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective”.

You can find out much more on Nasa’s “UAP FAQs” page, here.

Today’s hearings come in the same week that alleged “non-human” alien corpses were displayed to Mexican politicians at the country’s Congress.

A controversial sports journlist turned UFO enthusiast claimed the two small ‘corpses’ were retrieved from Cusco, Peru. They were presented in windowed boxes in Mexico City yesterday, stirring excitement within the UFO conspiracy theorist community.

Jaime Maussan, the self-proclaimed UFO expert who presented the curiosities, swore under oath that they were no part of “our terrestrial evolution”. Such claims have not been proven and Mr Maussan has previously been associated with claims of discoveries that have later been debunked.

You can read more about them here.

Nasa fist announced this hearing on Tuesday, releasing a media advisory that stated it planned to discuss the results of an independent study commissioned in 2022.

The report aims to inform the US space agency on what possible data could be collected in the future to shed light on the nature and origin of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) - more commonly known as UFOs.

“Nasa defines UAP as observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective,” the advisory stated. “There are currently a limited number of high-quality observations of UAP, which make it impossible to draw firm scientific conclusions about their nature.”

This will not be the first time Nasa chief Bill Nelson has spoken publicly about aliens. In 2021 he was doing the media rounds following another report on unidentified anomolous phenomena (UAPs), revealing that there were things that could not be explained but no actual direct evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

“We have a program in Nasa called The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) but thus far we don’t have any receipt of communication from something that’s intelligence,” he told CNN.

You can watch the whole interview here: