Last week, Nasa held the first public meeting of a panel established to investigate sightings of UFOs. It came just before a whistleblower former intelligence official told the Debrief that the US government had ‘intact and partially intact’ craft of non-human origin. Ian Sample talks to Prof David Spergel, the independent chair of Nasa’s panel, about why this is happening now, what they hope to find and why there is so much stigma attached to this field. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

It's a question that's fascinated us since humans first looked up at the night sky.

And this week, it became a subject of heated debate yet again.

The US government found quite a number of them and they are indeed of non-human origin.

Those are the explosive allegations from a former intelligence officer tonight in a whistleblower complaint that the Inspector General is taking very seriously.

David Grush led an analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, that's UFOs to you and me, within the US Department of Defence Agency.

He says the US government have possession of intact and partially intact alien vehicles, and even claims they have evidence of alien life retrieved from these craft.

Well, naturally, when you recover something that's either landed or crashed, Sometimes you encounter dead pilots.

And believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it's true.

Back in April, a Pentagon official told senators that they found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics.

But this all comes at an interesting time for UFO watchers.

Last week the same top Pentagon chief revealed that unidentified metallic orb-like UAPs have been spotted all over the world.

This is a spherical orb, metallic, in the Middle East,

This is a typical example of the thing that we see most of.

We see these all over the world and we see these making very interesting apparent manoeuvres.

Sean Kirkpatrick was speaking at the first public meeting of NASA's own panel on UAPs.

He said the Pentagon had examined hundreds of classified reports collected over the last quarter century.

And while most of these sightings can be dismissed as fairly mundane, a small fraction remain unexplained.

So today I'm talking to Professor David Spurgill, the chair of NASA's UAP panel, to find out what they'll be looking at, why sightings are so difficult to verify, and what role you and I can play using just our smartphones.

I'm The Guardian's science editor Ian Sample, and this is Science Weekly.

Before we begin, this interview was recorded before the news of the whistleblower was published.

In a comment to The Guardian, Professor Spergel said he did not know David Grush and has no knowledge of his claims.

David Spergel, you're an astrophysicist chairing this panel of scientists commissioned by NASA.

Can you tell us firstly why the panel was assembled and what the impetus is behind doing it now?

I think there's a couple of things going on.

So 1 is there's just an increased interest in UAPs.

And I think that's driven by both interest in the general public and events like that balloon flight over the United States that have increased interest from a security side.

We've heard of spy planes and spy satellites, but spy balloons?

Well, the Pentagon says the Chinese government has 1 over the US right now at an altitude far above where commercial planes fly.

This combination led Congress to set up an organisation called the AARO, which is a joint effort between the Defense Department and the intelligence communities.

And AARO stands for the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which has been set up by the Pentagon to look into these things.

And as this started up, the NASA administrator, Senator Nelson, felt that this is something that NASA could contribute to.

The Pentagon recently formed a new office to study UFO reports and now, Now it's NASA's turn.

The space agency launching a new team to investigate who or what may be behind the unexplained sightings.

So my hopes for this is that we will produce a roadmap on how NASA can contribute to our understanding of anomalous events.

You know, I think 1 of the perceptions that was out in the public, which was not really our charge, was to figure out the nature of all these events.

But really it's to look at how could NASA be helpful here?

And I think it's something where this very much fits into NASA's mission, NASA's missions, is to understand and discover what's going on in our atmosphere and beyond.

So you're not necessarily analysing everything that's already come in, but you're helping to design systems for better understanding future sightings using NASA's expertise.

And this is something you'll do in conjunction with the Department of Defence's own work around UAP.

So you're sort of working together on this.

We've been very much informed by briefings, both in advance of the meeting and at this meeting by the ARO.

And we have looked at some of the reported events, and we're looking to see how NASA can complement what the ARO is doing.

So just to be clear, when we're talking about reported events, this could be information submitted by anyone from a farmer in their field looking up at the sky to an Air Force pilot, to an astronaut even.

Some of our committee members have high level clearances.

I do not, nor do many of the other members of the committee.

So we're looking at what's out there in the unclassified side.

Everything associated with both military technologies and intelligence community technologies are classified.

So, if an F-35 takes a picture of a bird, it is classified, not because of what's in the picture, but the way the picture was taken.

If a spy satellite takes an image of a football pitch, it is classified because by looking at that image of a football pitch, you can infer the capabilities of that spy satellite.

And I would say among the things we've learned is, in a way, a difference in culture between military organizations and scientists on how you approach anomalies.

If you're a pilot flying from point A to point B, and you see something interesting, your responsibility are to make sure that does not represent a threat to you or to others.

Once you think it's not a threat to you, you move on and your job is to get from point A to point B.

If you're a scientist and you see something strange in a different direction, your responsibility in many ways is to understand that strange thing.

So I think my starting point in this is we want to understand anomalies, we want to make sure anomalies are reported, We want to make sure that we collect the data on anomalies because that's how we learn.

Can you imagine the excitement, John, when they showed this video, I want to show it to you now, where it was taken by 1 plane and they saw against the night sky those 3 little dots there.

The airplane that spotted them said we don't know what that is.

And now, Spoiler alert, the NASA scientists studied this and eventually they said, when you put all the evidence together, what this was was 3 commercial aircraft in a typical flight corridor.

The reason they couldn't chase them down is because they're much further away than they thought.

So many of these events turn out to have fairly mundane explanations, but I'm wondering, of those still deemed anomalous, whether there are any that you find particularly intriguing?

Not necessarily because it might be little gritty men from outer space, but more a question of, what are we looking at here and how has this effect arisen?

Yeah, I mean, there are some things that you look at and say, we don't understand this.

This is why you really want to have multiple cameras taking observations at multiple wavelengths so you can understand what's going on.

And as I look at this, I'm informed very much by the history of astronomical anomalies that took us a long time to figure out.

A good example is something called a gamma ray burst.

These gamma ray bursts were powerful explosions of gamma rays seen first by spy satellites designed to look for nuclear weapons.

They were actually classified for a number of years because they thought they were associated with nuclear weapon tests.

But after a while, they realised they were coming from out of space.

So sometimes anomalies can turn out to be a way in which we discover really profound things.

David, many people will have seen those grainy videos filmed by the US naval pilots.

I think the video was leaked to the New York Times in 2017.

It felt to me like that sort of reignited the mainstream interest in UAPs.

What did you make of those particular incidents?

I looked at that and I thought, boy, I wish we had better data.

We'd like to see what the radio signatures are.

We'd like to see what other signatures are coming from that.

We'd like to see them observed from multiple angles.

And 1 of the things that I think certainly I've learned through this process is how difficult it is for a pilot to sometimes assess distance to an object.

When you look at the cameras that are sitting on a military plane, they are not scientific instruments.

They are not calibrated to look at what happens if the sun is off in a corner or if there's a balloon moving off in the distance.

They are designed to assess threats and record information about potential threats to that plane.

I think with that footage it was really hard to ignore how excited the pilots were by what they thought they were seeing.

And it made me wonder whether pilots are working in conditions that make them sort of more susceptible to seeing things that are hard to explain.

Yeah, I mean, what's been very useful on the panel is to have Scott Kelly, 1 of the astronauts who's had extensive flight experience.

And he talked about some of the things that they experienced flying.

I remember 1 time I was flying in the warning areas off of Virginia Beach military operating area there, and my RIO, the guy that sits in the back of the Tomcat, was convinced We flew by a UFO.

My favorite story was they were describing closing up the shuttle door.

And as they closed it, they thought there was some odd object that was seen to be trapped in the door that they were worried about.

And they thought it was a tool, maybe a bolt.

They were potentially going to have to go and do a spacewalk to retrieve it.

But before they did that, they took a picture of it.

And when they blew up the picture, they realized that this is not a bolt or a tool.

It was actually the International Space Station that was 80 miles away.

I mean, that's just a really good example of how this environment we operate in is so, so conducive to optical illusions.

Do you think there's still some stigma around this topic that puts people off reporting strange things they see, particularly when it's in the course of their work?

Oh, there's absolutely stigma associated with this.

I think this has led to an underreporting of events.

I think there are things like weather balloons where they shouldn't be, there are threats to aviation that don't get reported because commercial pilots feel there's a stigma associated with it.

The military pilots who reported the Tic Tac event that you talked about earlier, described to us the stigma and the unpleasantness they experienced for reporting events.

We want people to report things that are anomalous and not have stigma associated.

And that's 1 of the things I'm hoping just by the report happening that NASA is engaged with this issue, this will already help reduce some of the stigma.

Why do you think it seems to evoke these strong feelings in some people?

I mean, even people on your panel have faced some serious online abuse for their work on the topic.

Yeah, I mean, the emails that we get, tweets we've gotten, and they come from both sides.

We have people who think that it is inappropriate that NASA and we spend any time on what they consider craziness with UFOs, and others who are profound believers, who think that just questioning their profound belief that, you know, they are experienced visits from aliens, we're sort of, we're undermining their world view.

And sadly, we're in this place right now where whether it's discussion of aliens or politics, People like to subject others to harassment.

I think this is a very unfortunate aspect of the modern world we live in with social media.

David, from your point of view, is there any role for us members of the public in this endeavour?

I think 1 of the opportunities are to use the 3 to 4 billion cell phones that we have.

They have not only cameras that produce high quality digital images, but almost all of them have GPS, so they can record exact locations and they record accurate time.

Your phone has a gravitometer in it that measures the local gravitational field, so it knows its orientation.

Most phones also measure the local magnetic field, record sound.

They really are very powerful instruments that we are carrying around with us.

And This might be a nice example of citizen science where NASA serves as the host for collecting data and creates a site where people can look at it and study these events.

Most events will turn out to be pictures of airplanes and balloons, but every now and then there might be some profound discovery.

But if you do find something that looks like it's from another planet, what's the process for making that information public?

Or do you just cross that bridge if and when you come to it?

I think mostly 1 crosses that bridge when you come to it.

But I think in this, like in so many areas, I'm a big believer in open data, open analyses.

When you have an image from a single source, it's not terribly reliable.

You wanna have a high quality reliable data that's openly available.

And this will not convince some people who are sure that NASA and the government are hiding something.

I've worked with NASA long enough in my career to know that it's not very good at hiding anything.

If there was something that was hiding, it would have long ago leaked.

You know, I think that there is a sense of vast conspiracies out there and anything we can do to build trust and engage people in open analysis can be helpful.

David, thank you so much for taking us through this.

Thanks again to Professor David Spurgill.

You can find links to more Guardian reporting on this story on the podcast webpage at theguardian.com.

The sound design was by Tony Onuchukwu, and the executive producer was Ellie Burey.


Speaker 0: This is The Guardian. Are we alone in the universe? It's a question that's fascinated us since humans first looked up at the night sky. And this week, it became a subject of heated debate yet again.

Speaker 1: UFOs exist. The US government found quite a number of them and they are indeed of non-human origin. Those are the explosive allegations from a former intelligence officer tonight in a whistleblower complaint that the Inspector General is taking very seriously.

Speaker 0: David Grush led an analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, that's UFOs to you and me, within the US Department of Defence Agency. He says the US government have possession of intact and partially intact alien vehicles, and even claims they have evidence of alien life retrieved from these craft. Do we have bodies? Do we have species?

Speaker 2: Well, naturally, when you recover something that's either landed or crashed, Sometimes you encounter dead pilots. And believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it's true.

Speaker 0: Back in April, a Pentagon official told senators that they found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics. But this all comes at an interesting time for UFO watchers. Last week the same top Pentagon chief revealed that unidentified metallic orb-like UAPs have been spotted all over the world.

Speaker 3: This is a spherical orb, metallic, in the Middle East,

Speaker 0: 2022.

Speaker 3: This is a typical example of the thing that we see most of. We see these all over the world and we see these making very interesting apparent manoeuvres.

Speaker 0: Sean Kirkpatrick was speaking at the first public meeting of NASA's own panel on UAPs. He said the Pentagon had examined hundreds of classified reports collected over the last quarter century. And while most of these sightings can be dismissed as fairly mundane, a small fraction remain unexplained.

Speaker 3: Oh my gosh. We're all going against the wind. The wind's 120 knots to the west. Oh, thank you. It's rotating.

Speaker 0: So today I'm talking to Professor David Spurgill, the chair of NASA's UAP panel, to find out what they'll be looking at, why sightings are so difficult to verify, and what role you and I can play using just our smartphones. I'm The Guardian's science editor Ian Sample, and this is Science Weekly. Before we begin, this interview was recorded before the news of the whistleblower was published. In a comment to The Guardian, Professor Spergel said he did not know David Grush and has no knowledge of his claims. David Spergel, you're an astrophysicist chairing this panel of scientists commissioned by NASA.

Can you tell us firstly why the panel was assembled and what the impetus is behind doing it now?

Speaker 4: I think there's a couple of things going on. So 1 is there's just an increased interest in UAPs. And I think that's driven by both interest in the general public and events like that balloon flight over the United States that have increased interest from a security side.

Speaker 5: We've heard of spy planes and spy satellites, but spy balloons? Well, the Pentagon says the Chinese government has 1 over the US right now at an altitude far above where commercial planes fly.

Speaker 4: This combination led Congress to set up an organisation called the AARO, which is a joint effort between the Defense Department and the intelligence communities.

Speaker 0: And AARO stands for the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which has been set up by the Pentagon to look into these things.

Speaker 4: That's right. And as this started up, the NASA administrator, Senator Nelson, felt that this is something that NASA could contribute to.

Speaker 6: The Pentagon recently formed a new office to study UFO reports and now, Now it's NASA's turn. The space agency launching a new team to investigate who or what may be behind the unexplained sightings.

Speaker 0: So what's the aim of your panel? What are you hoping to achieve?

Speaker 4: So my hopes for this is that we will produce a roadmap on how NASA can contribute to our understanding of anomalous events. You know, I think 1 of the perceptions that was out in the public, which was not really our charge, was to figure out the nature of all these events. But really it's to look at how could NASA be helpful here? And I think it's something where this very much fits into NASA's mission, NASA's missions, is to understand and discover what's going on in our atmosphere and beyond.

Speaker 0: So you're not necessarily analysing everything that's already come in, but you're helping to design systems for better understanding future sightings using NASA's expertise. And this is something you'll do in conjunction with the Department of Defence's own work around UAP. So you're sort of working together on this.

Speaker 4: That's right. We've been very much informed by briefings, both in advance of the meeting and at this meeting by the ARO. And we have looked at some of the reported events, and we're looking to see how NASA can complement what the ARO is doing.

Speaker 0: So just to be clear, when we're talking about reported events, this could be information submitted by anyone from a farmer in their field looking up at the sky to an Air Force pilot, to an astronaut even.

Speaker 4: That's right. Some of our committee members have high level clearances. I do not, nor do many of the other members of the committee. So we're looking at what's out there in the unclassified side. Everything associated with both military technologies and intelligence community technologies are classified.

So, if an F-35 takes a picture of a bird, it is classified, not because of what's in the picture, but the way the picture was taken. If a spy satellite takes an image of a football pitch, it is classified because by looking at that image of a football pitch, you can infer the capabilities of that spy satellite. And I would say among the things we've learned is, in a way, a difference in culture between military organizations and scientists on how you approach anomalies. If you're a pilot flying from point A to point B, and you see something interesting, your responsibility are to make sure that does not represent a threat to you or to others. Once you think it's not a threat to you, you move on and your job is to get from point A to point B.

If you're a scientist and you see something strange in a different direction, your responsibility in many ways is to understand that strange thing. So I think my starting point in this is we want to understand anomalies, we want to make sure anomalies are reported, We want to make sure that we collect the data on anomalies because that's how we learn.

Speaker 7: Can you imagine the excitement, John, when they showed this video, I want to show it to you now, where it was taken by 1 plane and they saw against the night sky those 3 little dots there. Look at them. They're moving in concert. The airplane that spotted them said we don't know what that is. They tried to chase it down.

They could not chase it down. And now, Spoiler alert, the NASA scientists studied this and eventually they said, when you put all the evidence together, what this was was 3 commercial aircraft in a typical flight corridor. The reason they couldn't chase them down is because they're much further away than they thought.

Speaker 0: So many of these events turn out to have fairly mundane explanations, but I'm wondering, of those still deemed anomalous, whether there are any that you find particularly intriguing? Not necessarily because it might be little gritty men from outer space, but more a question of, what are we looking at here and how has this effect arisen?

Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, there are some things that you look at and say, we don't understand this. This is why you really want to have multiple cameras taking observations at multiple wavelengths so you can understand what's going on. And as I look at this, I'm informed very much by the history of astronomical anomalies that took us a long time to figure out. A good example is something called a gamma ray burst. These gamma ray bursts were powerful explosions of gamma rays seen first by spy satellites designed to look for nuclear weapons.

They were actually classified for a number of years because they thought they were associated with nuclear weapon tests. But after a while, they realised they were coming from out of space. So sometimes anomalies can turn out to be a way in which we discover really profound things.

Speaker 0: David, many people will have seen those grainy videos filmed by the US naval pilots. I think the video was leaked to the New York Times in 2017. It felt to me like that sort of reignited the mainstream interest in UAPs. What did you make of those particular incidents?

Speaker 4: I looked at that and I thought, boy, I wish we had better data. We'd like to see what the radio signatures are. We'd like to see what other signatures are coming from that. We'd like to see them observed from multiple angles. And 1 of the things that I think certainly I've learned through this process is how difficult it is for a pilot to sometimes assess distance to an object.

When you look at the cameras that are sitting on a military plane, they are not scientific instruments. They are not calibrated to look at what happens if the sun is off in a corner or if there's a balloon moving off in the distance. They are designed to assess threats and record information about potential threats to that plane.

Speaker 0: I think with that footage it was really hard to ignore how excited the pilots were by what they thought they were seeing. And it made me wonder whether pilots are working in conditions that make them sort of more susceptible to seeing things that are hard to explain.

Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, what's been very useful on the panel is to have Scott Kelly, 1 of the astronauts who's had extensive flight experience. And he talked about some of the things that they experienced flying.

Speaker 8: I remember 1 time I was flying in the warning areas off of Virginia Beach military operating area there, and my RIO, the guy that sits in the back of the Tomcat, was convinced We flew by a UFO. So I didn't see it. We turned around. We went to go look at it. It turns out it was Bart Simpson.

A balloon.

Speaker 4: My favorite story was they were describing closing up the shuttle door. And as they closed it, they thought there was some odd object that was seen to be trapped in the door that they were worried about.

Speaker 8: And they thought it was a tool, maybe a bolt. They couldn't quite figure it out. They were potentially going to have to go and do a spacewalk to retrieve it. But before they did that, they took a picture of it. And when they blew up the picture, they realized that this is not a bolt or a tool.

It was actually the International Space Station that was 80 miles away. I mean, that's just a really good example of how this environment we operate in is so, so conducive to optical illusions.

Speaker 0: Do you think there's still some stigma around this topic that puts people off reporting strange things they see, particularly when it's in the course of their work?

Speaker 4: Oh, there's absolutely stigma associated with this. I think this has led to an underreporting of events. I think there are things like weather balloons where they shouldn't be, there are threats to aviation that don't get reported because commercial pilots feel there's a stigma associated with it. The military pilots who reported the Tic Tac event that you talked about earlier, described to us the stigma and the unpleasantness they experienced for reporting events. We want people to report things that are anomalous and not have stigma associated.

And that's 1 of the things I'm hoping just by the report happening that NASA is engaged with this issue, this will already help reduce some of the stigma.

Speaker 0: Why do you think it seems to evoke these strong feelings in some people? I mean, even people on your panel have faced some serious online abuse for their work on the topic.

Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, the emails that we get, tweets we've gotten, and they come from both sides. We have people who think that it is inappropriate that NASA and we spend any time on what they consider craziness with UFOs, and others who are profound believers, who think that just questioning their profound belief that, you know, they are experienced visits from aliens, we're sort of, we're undermining their world view. And sadly, we're in this place right now where whether it's discussion of aliens or politics, People like to subject others to harassment. I think this is a very unfortunate aspect of the modern world we live in with social media.

Speaker 0: David, from your point of view, is there any role for us members of the public in this endeavour?

Speaker 4: I think 1 of the opportunities are to use the 3 to 4 billion cell phones that we have. They're remarkable instruments, right? They have not only cameras that produce high quality digital images, but almost all of them have GPS, so they can record exact locations and they record accurate time. Your phone has a gravitometer in it that measures the local gravitational field, so it knows its orientation. Most phones also measure the local magnetic field, record sound.

They really are very powerful instruments that we are carrying around with us. And This might be a nice example of citizen science where NASA serves as the host for collecting data and creates a site where people can look at it and study these events. Most events will turn out to be pictures of airplanes and balloons, but every now and then there might be some profound discovery.

Speaker 0: But if you do find something that looks like it's from another planet, what's the process for making that information public? Or do you just cross that bridge if and when you come to it?

Speaker 4: I think mostly 1 crosses that bridge when you come to it. But I think in this, like in so many areas, I'm a big believer in open data, open analyses. When you have an image from a single source, it's not terribly reliable. You wanna have a high quality reliable data that's openly available. And this will not convince some people who are sure that NASA and the government are hiding something.

I've worked with NASA long enough in my career to know that it's not very good at hiding anything. If there was something that was hiding, it would have long ago leaked. You know, I think that there is a sense of vast conspiracies out there and anything we can do to build trust and engage people in open analysis can be helpful.

Speaker 0: David, thank you so much for taking us through this. Real pleasure to have you on.

Speaker 4: My pleasure.

Speaker 0: Thanks again to Professor David Spurgill. You can find links to more Guardian reporting on this story on the podcast webpage at theguardian.com. And that's all from us. The producer was Eli Block. The sound design was by Tony Onuchukwu, and the executive producer was Ellie Burey.

We'll be back on Tuesday. See you then. This is the Guardian.

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Why is Nasa looking into UFOs and what has it found so far?