Key Points
WASHINGTON, May 31 (Reuters) - Members of an independent NASA panel studying UFOs, or what the U.S. government now terms UAP for "unidentified anomalous phenomena," said in their first public meeting on Wednesday that scant high-quality data and a lingering stigma pose the greatest barriers to unraveling such mysteries...
The panel's chairman, astrophysicist David Spergel, said his team's role was "not to resolve the nature of these events," but rather to give NASA a "roadmap" to guide future analysis...
While the Pentagon in recent years has encouraged military aviators to document UAP events, many commercial pilots remain "very reluctant to report" them due to the lingering stigma surrounding such sightings, Spergel said...
In a departure from the Pentagon, NASA's panel is examining only unclassified reports from civilian observers, an approach Spergel said permits open sharing of information among scientific, commercial and international entities, as well as the public...
Recent U.S. law revised the UAP acronym, previously confined to "aerial" phenomena, to stand for "unidentified anomalous phenomena," expanding the NASA study team's research scope to include puzzling events in space or at sea...
