By Kasim Ileri
WASHINGTON (AA) - There is no evidence that can be considered the product of non-human intelligence or the existence of extraterrestrial life, NASA said on Wednesday.
"To make the claim that we see something that is evidence of non-human intelligence would require extraordinary evidence, and we have not seen that," said David Spergel at NASA's first public meeting on Wednesday to discuss the upcoming UAP report.
Last year, NASA created a team, led by astrophysicist David Spergel, to study to examine events that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena.
During the public meeting, the team addressed concerns about the existence of extraterrestrial lifeforms in relation to UAP. NASA stated that there is no convincing evidence linking UAP to extraterrestrial life.
They emphasized that the study of UAP is distinct from the search for extraterrestrial life.
UAP is a broader term used to describe any unidentified object or anomaly observed in the sky, including both human-made and natural phenomena, whereas UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) specifically refers to an object in the sky that remains unidentified and cannot be readily explained by conventional means.
While Spergel chaired the 4-hour briefing on the first findings of the board's report, which is scheduled to be published in July, many academics attended the meeting as speakers, as well as officials from the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and NASA.
Speaking at the meeting, Director of the All-Fields Anomaly Resolution Office of the Ministry of Defense Sean Kirkpatrick said that they have received more than 800 UFO reports so far, with 50 to 100 reports monthly.
Kirkpatrick said that they considered very few of them as unidentifiable abnormalities.
Sharing an image taken recently at the meeting, Kirkpatrick addressed that this image, in which the bright object in the form of three dots is seen, was taken by a P-3 aircraft making a reconnaissance flight over the US, and that the pilots of the aircraft said that they could not catch the objects.
Kirkpatrick later stressed that the objects were actually planes about to land at an airport at a much further point than the pilots of the P-3 had thought.
They have extensive surveillance tools at their disposal, but international restrictions also make global scrutiny difficult, he said.
- Increase in UAP sightings in the US after the China bubble event
Speaking at the meeting, Mike Freie, Technical Advisor at the FAA Office of Air Traffic Surveillance Services, said that there are more than 880,000 registered drones across the country and tens of thousands of drones are flown daily.
Addressing that these systems pose a significant challenge for the air surveillance process, Freie said that there has been an increase in the number of UAP reports coming to the FAA, especially after SpaceX's Starlink launch.
Freie reported that they saw a significant increase in reports of unidentified objects after a Chinese balloon was detected and dropped from US airspace in February.
- 'Are there aliens?'
At the meeting, the question was asked whether there was a non-human intelligence behind the detected objects.
Anamaria Berea, Associate Professor of Computing and Data Science at George Mason University, said the team consists of scientists and they will follow the data.
Noting that their task is to create a roadmap and framework for how they can further examine these anomalous images, Berea said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Whether we are alone in the universe is probably one of the largest questions that we've had in our history of humanity."
Answering the same question, Spergel emphasized that such extraordinary evidence has not yet been seen by experts.
Expressing that much of NASA's work is "searching for life in any form" outside Earth, Spergel said, "the search for life is a really important theme. We haven't found life beyond Earth yet, but we're looking for it in lots of different ways."
On the other hand, Spergel said that NASA has yet to see non-human intelligence or extraordinary evidence of it.
Answering the question of what NASA will do if there is life outside of Earth, the US scientist said that whether life outside of Earth is actually possible is the biggest question that the agency is interested in, but they have not yet found evidence of such a situation.
Mike Gold, one of the Redwire executives, who made evaluations at the meeting, said that it was a big problem that they could not define what they were looking for yet.
Gold said, "We're not looking for a needle in a haystack. We're looking for anomalies in a haystack. So we don't even know we're looking for a needle. I don't know what the phenomenology is that we're looking for."
*Alperen Aktas in Ankara contributed to this story