NASA shifts UFO debate from sensationalism to science | Data Premium

Mexican Congress hears testimony on extraterrestrials; NASA panel recommends increased efforts to gather info on UAPs; U.S. govt. has done U-turn on public info on UAPs; AARO has classified UFO/UAP sightings; 800+ sightings collected, only a few unidentified.

Unidentified flying objects, or UFOs in common parlance, were in the news again a few days ago for two contrasting reasons.

Last week, lawmakers in the Mexican Congress heard testimony from individuals suggesting the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrials. These individuals hailed from Mexico, the U.S., Japan, and Brazil. Journalist José Jaime Maussan presented two boxes that encased what he claimed were mummies found in Peru, of beings that he and others considered “non-human beings that are not part of our terrestrial evolution.” Similar findings in the past and in the area turned out to be the remains of mummified children. Scientists have called Mr. Maussan’s claim fraudulent and said that the mummies may have been looted from grave sites.

Two days later, in an unrelated event, a NASA panel recommended in a report that the U.S. space agency increase its efforts to gather information on unidentified objects in the sky, labelled ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,’ or UAP, by the government, and play a larger role in helping the Pentagon spot them. More importantly, the report, the result of a year-long study, also found no evidence that past UAP observations concerned objects of extraterrestrial origin. “We want to shift the conversation about UAPs from sensationalism to science,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said last week.

Regarding the reliability of UFO/UAP sightings, the report said: “UAP data are rarely, if ever, collected in a concerted effort to understand the phenomenon; they are usually coincidental observations.” Curiously, such observations, collated by a self-reporting database called ‘The National UFO Reporting Center Online Database’ (NUFORC), have been confined mostly to the U.S.

Chart 1 | The chart shows the number of self-reported observations recorded in the NUFORC database.

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Of the self-reported observations, close to 90% are from the U.S. Most of the observations misconstrued natural phenomena or human-made objects that the observer was unaware of. The database also includes 479 self-reported observations of UFOs from India.