Key Points
- Up to 5 per cent of UFO reports received by NASA are unexplained.
- The panel was delivering a report on its UFO data from the past 27 years.
- NASA has received around 800 reports on UFOs.
A NASA panel studying what it calls "unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)," commonly known as UFOs, has revealed up to 5 per cent of sightings it has studied remain unexplained.
The first public meeting of the NASA panel detailed some of the findings from around 800 reports it received over the past 27 years.
NASA gets 50 to 100 new reports a month, but the number of those sightings "possibly really anomalous" makes up only 2 to 5 per cent of the total database.
The panel said there were no signs of extra-terrestrial life.
"We now know that there are lots of planets out there, so there are lots of potential environments for life," UAP team chair David Spergel said.
"We haven't found life beyond Earth yet, but we're looking".
But there were plenty of amusing objects found not to be UFOs.
Scott Kelly, a former astronaut and pilot with decades of experience, explained an optical illusion witnessed by his co-pilot when they were flying near Virginia Beach. His colleague "was convinced we flew by a UFO".
"I didn't see it. We turned around, we went to look at it, it turns out it was Bart Simpson - a balloon."
Are there UFOs in Australia?
Mr Spergel said confusing reports had been sent in from Australia.
Astronomers at the in 1998 reported infrequent and odd radio signals, called perytons, once or twice a year, that "had a really strange structure," he said.
"People couldn't figure out what was going on," he said.
The signals went unexplained until 2015 when new technology detected they were identical to that of a microwave oven.
The observatory's microwave was tested, but perytons were not detected when the microwave was operating as usual.
But when the door was opened before the microwave's time was up, the perytons were there.
"What had happened was that the people in the observatory would heat up their lunch in the microwave," Mr Spergel said.
"It produced a burst of radio signals that was picked up by sensitive detectors."
What data does NASA have on UFOs?
The 16-member body, assembling experts from fields ranging from physics to astrobiology, was formed last June to examine unclassified UFO sightings and other data collected from civilian government and commercial sectors.
"If I were to summarize in one line what I feel we've learned, it's we need high-quality data," Mr Spergel said in his opening remarks.
NASA said the focus of Wednesday's four-hour public session at the agency's headquarters in Washington was to hold "final deliberations" before the team publishes a report, which Mr Spergel said was planned for release by late July.
The team has "several months of work ahead of them," said Dan Evans, a senior research official at NASA's science unit, adding that panel members had been subjected to online abuse and harassment since they began their work.
"Harassment only leads to further stigmatisation of the UAP field, significantly hindering the scientific process and discouraging others to study this important subject matter," NASA's science chief Nicola Fox said in her opening remarks.
The panel noted commercial pilots are reluctant to report sightings because of the stigma surrounding flying saucers, and they were working to remove the stigma around reporting.
The panel represents the first such inquiry ever conducted under the auspices of the US space agency for a subject the government once consigned to the exclusive and secretive purview of military and national security officials.
