NASA held a public meeting at 10:30 a.m. EDT Wednesday, May 31, 2023, of its independent study team on categorizing and evaluating data of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). This is an archive of that broadcast, along with a working transcript below.
(It was followed by a media teleconference, which is archived here, with a transcript, as well.)
The transcript was created by The Black Vault with the help/assistance of AI. Then, manually, the names were matched up with the speakers, and a rough pass over the transcript was done, but it is far from perfect. However, the intent is to have some kind of a guide to the meeting that can be searched. For any corrections, feel free to CONTACT with changes.
Transcript
Dan Evans 00:13
Hello, good morning and welcome. My name is Dan Evans and is the designated federal official for NASA’s unidentified anomalous phenomena independent study team. I’d like to call this meeting to order and introduce the panelists. In the back row we have Nadia Drake, Paula Bontempi, Federica Bianco, David Grinspoon, Karlin Toner, Josh Semeter and Jennifer Buss. When in the front row, we have Walter Scott Warren Randolph, Reggie Brothers, Shelly Wright. Scott Kelly, Anamaria Berea, Mike Gold, and David Spergel, who serves as chair of the team. I have a few opening remarks. But to begin, I’d like to start with the following. First, I’d like to pay tribute to the life of retired Air Force Master Sergeant Sam Satow, who’s been laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery today. Following his active duty service, Sam served as the intelligence collection manager for the National Intelligence manager for aviation, where he played a critical role in UAP analysis. All of us at NASA offer our condolences to Sam’s family, friends and colleagues. Second, I’d like to take this opportunity to express my profound gratitude to our distinguished panel of experts for their unwavering commitment and dedication. it’s disheartening to note that several of them have been subjected to online abuse due to their decision to participate on this panel. And NASA security team is actively addressing this issue. We at NASA, acutely aware of the considerable public interest in UAP. However, it’s critical to understand any form of harassment towards our panelists only serves to detract from the scientific process, which requires an environment of respect and openness. Now, every member of our team is a recognized authority in their respective field, and they have our unequivocal support. NASA stands in solidarity with them, advocating for a respectful discourse that fits their expertise, and the significance of their work. Thanks. Now, in recent years, the subject of unidentified aerial phenomena nowadays turned on identifying anomalous phenomena, or UAPs has captured the attention of the public, the scientific community and the government alike. And it’s now our collective responsibility to investigate these occurrences with the rigorous scientific scrutiny that they deserve. NASA Administrator, Senator Bill Nelson believes that understanding UAPs is vital for several reasons, which is why he directed this study. First and foremost, it provides an opportunity for us to expand our understanding of the world around us, is an organization dedicated to exploring the unknown, this work is in our DNA. Secondly, this study aims to enhance situational awareness. The presence of UAPs raises concerns about the safety of our skies. And it’s this nation’s obligation to determine whether these phenomena pose any potential risks to airspace safety. By understanding the nature of UAPs, we can ensure that our skies remain a safe space for all. In order to achieve these goals, it is crucial that we employ a scientific lens for our UAP work. It’s precisely this rigorous, evidence based approach that allows one to separate fact from fiction. This team is comprised of experts from various disciplines, which allows them to approach this work from multiple perspective. And we have greatly benefited from that collective expertise. Now, why do we value a scientific approach? It’s because science is built on evidence. It thrives on scrutiny, it demands reproduce, reproduce, reproduce reproducibility report that you feel I can sorry, and above all, objectivity when we approach UAPs. From a scientific perspective, we do not come in with an agenda, we come in needing a roadmap. Indeed, the primary objective of this incredible team of experts is not to go back and look at grainy footage of UAPs but rather to give us a roadmap to guide us for future analysis. This is the very scientific method that NASA holds true to its heart. Scientific research is intended to be publicly available and transparent. And NASA prides itself on making its data and images available to the public to learn and explore on their own. By holding public meetings like this one, we aim for open and honest dialogue with the public We recognize that public interest in UAPs is high, and that the demand for answers is strong. conversations like this one, are the first step to reducing the stigma surrounding UAP reporting. Moreover, transparency is essential for fostering trust between NASA, the public, and the scientific community. In order to do things right, we must work together, pooling our resources, our knowledge, and our expertise. And by maintaining open channels of communication, we can facilitate collaboration, encourage the exchange of ideas, and ensure that our work is as robust as possible. Not only that, but our commitment to openness is in itself. A reflection of NASA’s commitment to scientific integrity is an organization dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. It is NASA’s responsibility to be honest and forthright and to follow the science. And by being transparent in our work, we uphold our dedication to scientific excellence. The meeting today represents the first deliberative actions that the team has taken. And so it’s important to keep in mind that these still have several months of work ahead of them. Their final report will be released this summer, and we will publish it on our website. NASA believes that the study of unidentified anomalous phenomena represents an exciting step forward in our quest to uncover the mysteries of the world around us. By embracing a scientific lens, we ensure that our work is rigorous and reliable. And by valuing transparency and openness, we can foster trust and collaboration with the public. Simply put, this is why we do what we do. Now, before I introduce Nicky, there are a few administrative matters to attend to. Firstly, the identified anomalous phenomena independent study team that’s been established in accordance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act known as facut. Its parent committee is the Earth Science Advisory Committees. As such, this group does not report to the government. It reports to the Science Advisory Committee will debate the recommendations on formally transmit this team’s report to the government. Next, our deliberative committee meetings such as this one are open to the public. And also after this panel was convened the National Defense Authorization Act, known as the NDAA change the A in UAP to be anomalous. Accordingly, this pals remit was expanded to encompass not just aerial UAP however, the majority of ERP sightings to date have been in the aerial domain. So it’s fair to say that this panel’s focus is on the aerial aspects of anomalous. Now in compliance with a fact of fact a federal statute former minutes have been taken throughout the meeting today. And these meetings and these minutes are for the public record, and hence, all presentations and discussions and comments by the committee members should be considered to be on the record. Each member of this UAP study team has been appointed because of their specific subject matter expertise as individuals, and hence each member is subject to federal ethics laws. This category of appointment is called special government employees or SGS. For our non government members, and our two federal employees serve as regular government employees known as IGS. To the panel, all members on this committee should remember to recuse themselves if a topic comes up in which you have a potential conflict of interest between your financial interests, including those of your employer, and matters that we’re discussing. And then finally, panel. If you have any ethics questions, please see me separately and if needed, I’ll put you in contact with a NASA ethics attorney. Thanks for bearing with me. I’d now like to turn to the amazing Dr. Nikki Fox, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Over to you, Nicky.
Nicola “Nicky” Fox 08:59
Thank you, Dan. And thank you to all the members of NASA’s UAP independent study team. Your selfless dedication to the pursuit of knowledge is just so commendable. And I want to thank you, the audience for tuning in today to watch our first deliberative meeting of NASA’s independent study team on evaluating and categorizing on identified anomalous phenomena. Before I begin, though, I really do want to double down on Dan’s words, that it is really disheartening to hear of the harassment that our panelists have faced online, all because they’re studying this topic. NASA stands behind our panelists and we do not tolerate abuse. Harassment only leads to further stigmatization of the UAP field, significantly hindering the scientific progress and discouraging others to study this important subject matter. Your harassment also obstructs the public’s right to knowledge. Our panelists are leading experts in the science terrific aeronautics and data analytics communities. We are very lucky to have them on board to share their invaluable insights to inform NASA on what possible data could be collected in the future, and how it can be collected. To help us better understand the nature of UAP. The UAP independent study was commissioned to create a roadmap on how to use the tools of science to evaluate and categorize the nature of UAPs going forward. This roadmap of course, will help the federal government obtain usable data to explain the nature of future UAPs. transparency, openness and scientific integrity are Pinnacle to NASA’s mission. They’re at the forefront of this public meeting, and have been throughout the team seven months on this study. As Dan noted, this is a working meeting and so the public will have the incredible opportunity to witness the process of science in action. At NASA, we lead the world in exploration and are committed to rigorous scientific inquiry. The nature of science is to better understand the unknown. And to do that our scientists need data. Right now there is very limited number of high quality observations and data curation of UAP. The existing data available from eyewitness reports are often muddled and cannot provide conclusive evidence that supports UAP recognition and analysis. Additionally, an object’s background can complicate the data further and render it unusable due to conventional objects that can mimic or overshadow the phenomena completely, such as commercial aircraft, military equipment, the weather, and ionospheric phenomena like auroras. This lack of high quality data make it impossible to draw scientific conclusions on the nature of UAP. Now, this team has used unclassified data from civilian government entities, commercial data, and data from other sources to inform their recommendations. And as Dan noted, they will be published in a public report that comes out this summer. I want to emphasize that there is really great benefit to studying unclassified data rather than classified data for this study. First, I’m identified anomalous phenomena sightings themselves are not classified. It’s often the sensor platform that is classified and you can kind of think of it, if a fighter jet took a picture of the Statue of Liberty, then that image would be classified not because of the subject in the picture, but because of the sensors on the plane. Second, unclassified data that make it possible for our team to communicate openly, to advance our understanding of UAP not only with each other, but across the scientific community and to the public. This ensures a clear and transparent pipeline of information that can be built upon through the general through generations to expand our understanding. This study relies on open data, everything we use at NASA is open, and anyone can look at these records. So I invite you to visit our Open Data [email protected], to comb through our 10s of 1000s of datasets that are free and fully accessible to the public. Additionally, please check out data.gov/open/data for a great overview of where you can find the archives for our science and mission data sites. I am very, very much looking forward to hearing the deliberations put forth today from our distinguished panel of experts. Thank you so much for being here.
David Spergel 13:45
Before you go, just want to open up to questions. Let me start with a question on this up on the NASA data. I think one of the important things that we’ll be looking at with other datasets and events as the data is not very well calibrated. Can you say just a little bit about how NASA goes through calibrating some of its earth science data?
Nicola “Nicky” Fox 14:06
Oh yes, we very very rigorous Earth’s I mean, all of our datasets not just Earth Science go through extremely rigorous calibration. We don’t release anything until it’s really perfect. I mean, we have quick look data that is marked as quick look data. So you know you can use it to get preliminary findings but wait for the the really nicely cleaned up data. So a lot of rigorous protocol in putting out our data to make sure it is perfect.
David Spergel 14:38
Do we have any other questions from the panel?
Nicola “Nicky” Fox 14:43
All right, thank you so much.
David Spergel 14:59
Hi I’m David Spergel. I’m the chair of the panel. And when I look at our chart, we have a lengthy charge. But the high level summary of it is how can NASA contribute to understanding the nature of UAPs. And our role here is not to resolve the nature of these events, but rather to give NASA guidance to provide a roadmap of how it can contribute to this in this area. After my opening remarks, we’ll hear from Sean Kirkpatrick from the A R O. And it’s the ARL that’s charged with leaving the whole of government UAP effort. And they’ve already issued some preliminary reports on some of the events. NASA’s role is to use its unique capabilities. And its role as a civilian agency, interacting with the scientific community in an open and transparent manner. And, you know, as Dr. Fox emphasize the Defense Intelligence Agency data on UAP are often classified primarily because of how the data is collected, not because what’s in the data. For camera on an F 35 took a picture of a bird. It’s classified. If a spy satellite takes an image of a balloon. And we’ve had in the news, some balloons recently, that date is classified. And that’s because of a desire to not reveal our technical capabilities to other nations. NASA, on the other hand, operates in a mode where it’s collecting data in the open. And the NASA data is available on websites and is well characterized. And because of NASA being the civilian agency studying air and space, it has a special role to play. And I see our charge primarily as helping identify for NASA ways it could play that role, and contribute to understanding. We’ve gone through a preliminary data collection stage. And to summarize some of the things that we’ve learned. The current data collection efforts regarding UAPs are unsystematic and fragmented across various agencies, often using instruments uncalibrated for scientific data collection. And if I think about the data that people have out there, it’s in many ways what we’d like to think of as citizen science. But again, it is uncalibrated data, poorly characterized, not well curated. And we face looking through this data, a significant background. A background of many of these events are commercial aircraft, civilian American military, drones, weather and research balloons, military equipment, ionospheric phenomenon, we need to characterize how, what the date when the date is taken, when it sees events like this first. The current existing data and eyewitness reports alone are insufficient to provide conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of every UAP event. They’re often and uninformative due to lack of quality control, and data curation. To understand UAP, better, targeted data collection, thorough data curation, and robust analyses are needed. Such an approach will help to discern unexplained UAP sightings. But even then there’s no guarantee that all sightings will be explained. Another challenge in this area is what we call stigma, there’s a real stigma among people reporting events. And despite NASA’s extensive efforts to reduce the stigma, the origin of the UAP is remain unclear. And we feel many events remain unreported. commercial pilots, for example, are very reluctant to report anomalies. And one of our goals and having NASA play a role is to remove stigma, and get high quality data. In fact, if I were to summarize, in one line, what I feel we’ve learned, it’s we need high quality data. And this is not some as a research scientist whose work has been primarily focused in cosmology. I would say the lesson of my career has been you want to address important questions. You need high quality data with well calibrated instruments. So the let me now introduce the agenda. We’re going to hear from a number of experts who will be presenting out to lunch. We’ll then break at 12, for lunch from 12 to 1230. At 1230, we’ll resume. And we’ll have presentations by members of the panel on some preliminary ideas for discussion. And that will be a period of time for some open discussion by the panel. We will then have a q&a session based on questions that have been sent in, in advance to the website. And we’ve curated those questions and group them together. And we’ll be going through a lot of those questions. And then we’ll summarize. And then over the subsequent couple months, we’ll work on putting together the report. And as Dan said, we’re aiming to make a public report available, we hope by the end of July. So now let me turn this over to Sean Kirkpatrick
Dan Evans 20:55
will do a couple of q&a. q&a for me. Okay, from the panel.
David Spergel 20:59
Any any questions on how thoughts? Yes, would get the mic?
Paula Bontempi 21:12
Yeah, so one of the things I think Dr. Fox said was looking at the release of data very important for our study, when it’s high quality. And you have also commented that data are not always perfect, when we’re doing certain studies, I wonder if you could shed some light on the, you know, the difference between the application of certain data to certain scientific challenges.
David Spergel 21:44
So, you know, when you look at your camera, your cameras often designed to take an image in the daytime, and might not be optimized for nighttime imaging. Or if you take something that astronomers are very familiar with, is we design our telescopes to work at night. And if the sun is not even if you’re, you know, you would never take the Hubble telescope and pointed at the sun, this would destroy its detectors. Not only that, if the telescope is pointing there, and the sun is over there, even though you’re not looking at the sun, reflections off of the optics will produce what we call ghosting. And that kind of ghosting gets, produces some very strange images. And this, you know, one of the many things we need to worry about when we see unusual things taken from a camera is, even if you’re pointing the camera, there was the sun over there. Those kinds of anomalies degrade the quality of the data. And that’s why it’s very important to work with well characterized instruments, and to be, you know, using them in ways in which you, you understand what, what’s going on. So I think if you look at, you know, data taken from the James Webb Telescope, or from the Hubble or these things, and these are, you know, telescopes looking out in space, you’ll see some really, you know, at first funny phenomenon, when a telescope points at a star that’s bright, it saturates the detector, and puts bleeding down the detector. And you’ll see phenomenon like, if there’s a bright star, off to the side of the dark that many wonder looking at, you get this effects where light bounces off of dust in your telescope, and produces a sort of diffuse image that has some really strange properties. So you know, when you see something unusual, the first thing you have to do is understand how that data was taken. And I think this is one of the challenges when faces when you have data taken by uncalibrated instruments years ago, it’s very hard to know what’s taken. It’s very hard to draw conclusions. I think that’s one of the challenges with archival data. And I think having dedicated well calibrated instruments, I think will be important here as in any other area to understand what’s going on.
Mike Gold 24:39
So, David, anomalies are so often the engine of discovery, maybe you can say a quick word about high risk, high reward research in your field of cosmology and how you see that impacting the UAP study as well.
David Spergel 24:53
So an area that comes to mind is on fast radio bursts. And shore prize was just announced yesterday was awarded to the discovery of Fast radio bursts. And these are these bursting signals that go off all over in space. And it’s an interesting story, because some of the bursts were real, and are fascinating. And some of the bursts, there was a series of bursts observed by this observatory in Australia. And they had really strange structure. And people couldn’t figure out what was going on. And then they start to notice a lot of them bunched together around lunchtime. And what had happened was, the people at the observatory would heat up their lunch in the microwave, and something they would do is they would open the door of the microwave oven before the microwave stopped. This is bad for your microwave oven. It wears it out. But not only that, it produces a burst of radio signal that was picked up by these sensitive detectors. So this, I think it’s an interesting lesson. Some events end up being something unusual and conventional. But some events with these FRPs turn out to be these powerful explosions, which are taking place at cosmological distances. They’re nature’s still not fully understood. I think they’re one of the really most fascinating objects, we have these bursts going out all over space. They’re interesting probes, because they’re kind of waiting up space between here and there. And they’re a subject of a reactive research. And if one looks at the history of these FRBs, at first, they were discovered, not believed and can finally confirmed, and they were discovered by instruments that were very sensitive, but not optimized for this. And now what we’re doing is we’re optimizing instruments and optimizing software to look for these events. And it’s often these surprises that turn out to be most interesting. And you know, there are phenomenon, like sprites, which you can think of as upward going lightning, which were seen by commercial pilots, and somewhat not believed, right, but they were very strange. And, and it was really only when we were able to take very high speed imaging data, data taken often from places like Space Station, that were able to see that and learn about these fascinating ionospheric phenomenon. So it’s surprises are really interesting. I mean, I think this is one of the fascinating things about the UAP phenomenon, if it’s something that’s anomalous, that makes it interesting and worthy of study. Other questions? Great. So now, let me turn it over to Sean.
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 28:30
Thank you, David. And it’s a pleasure to be back. Good morning, everyone. I want to start by thanking NASA for convening today’s UAP independent study public meeting, and inviting me to continue to participate. NASA has been an invaluable partner to our team at AARO as we work to better understand and respond to unidentified anomalous phenomena. We applaud NASA for commissioning its independent study team and for exploring what data and tools could be leveraged to shed greater light on UAP. Though NASA and AARO are taking on very different aspects of the UAP problem set, our efforts are very much complementary. We both are committed to the scientific method to a data driven approach, and the highest standards of scientific research integrity. While NASA is evaluating unclassified data sources for its study, AARO’s dataset includes classified material, with a focus on national security areas. However, all of this data collectively, is critical to understanding the nature and origin of UAP. NASA brings unique capabilities, world class scientists, and a wealth of academic and research linkages. NASA also has access to Earth sensing satellites, radiological sensors, tools for gravitational wave geomagnetic wave detection and means for analyzing open source clutter and crowd sourced data that may assist both AARO and NASA in their UAP efforts. We are very grateful for the partnership and welcome the opportunity to join with NASA to share our collective findings with the public, as the US government moves towards greater transparency on this issue. Last month, I testified before members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on emerging threats and capabilities, and shared some of the progress made since AARO’s establishment in July 2022. I discussed AARO’s scientific and analytical approaches. its efforts to improve UAP data collection, standardize our reporting processes, leverage our partnerships and meticulously review the US government’s UAP related historical records. As I told the subcommittee, then, the resolution of all UAP cases cannot be accomplished by DOD and the intelligence community alone. eras ultimate success will require partnerships with the interagency industry, academia, the scientific community, and the public, which all bring their own resources, ideas and expertise to the UAP challenge. We believe robust collaboration, and peer review, across a broad range of partners will promote greater objectivity and transparency in the study of UAP. Of course, NASA’s UAP independent study team was convened very much in that spirit. I also emphasize to Congress that the only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as anomalous. The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO and in our holdings demonstrate mundane characteristics of readily explainable sources. While a large number of cases and AARO’s holdings remain technically unresolved, this is primarily due to a lack of data associated with those cases, very much along the lines of what David was just speaking about. Without sufficient data, we are unable to reach defendable conclusions that meet the high scientific standards we set for resolution. Meanwhile, for the few objects that do demonstrate potentially anomalous characteristics, AARO is approaching these cases with the highest level of objectivity and analytical rigor. This includes physical testing and employing modeling and simulation to validate our analyses and the underlying theories, and then peer reviewing those results before reaching any conclusions. AARO has shared these cases with the appropriately cleared and asset team members in order to discuss and help recommend potential scientific areas of study that NASA may want to take lead on. I’ll underscore here as I did before Congress that AARO’s work will take time, if we are committed to doing it right. AARO is committed to the highest standards of scientific research integrity. As we know, our partners at NASA are as well. Thanks again to NASA for hosting this public forum for UAP discussion and information exchange. And I’d like to turn to a brief presentation that includes some recently declassified footage and trends for discussion. Next slide, please. So some of you probably saw a version of this at the open hearing last month. This is an overall review of all the analytic trends of all the cases that we have to date. While the numbers may have changed a little bit. The overall trends remain the same. Most of what we are seeing reported by aircraft are at the altitudes where we fly aircraft, that should not be a surprise. You will note however, that I have no space reports and I have no maritime reports. That is notable even though we are looking across all of those domains. On the upper right, we have UAP morphologies, the vast majority of what has been reported and what we have data on little less than half now our orbs round spheres. And in the bottom right, you will see in the really the heat map of the areas where we get most of our reporting. This is very much a collection biased map. This is where our sensors are our military and our IC and some of the FAA data in the middle with is what we call our typical UAP characteristics for the vast majority of the cases that we see. One way of looking at that is a they will call it a target package. This is the thing we are out hunting for in most cases. Next slide please. This was an example of one that I showed at the hearing recently. This is a spherical or metallic in the Middle East 2022 by an MQ nine, I will come back to the sensor question that David raised here in a moment. This is a typical example of the thing that we see most of we see these all over the world. And we see these in and making very interesting apparent maneuvers. This one in particular, however, I would point out, demonstrated knowing enigmatic technical capabilities, and was no threat to airborne safety. While we are still looking at it, I don’t have any more data other than that. And so being able to come to some conclusion is going to take time, until we can get better resolved data on similar objects that we can then do a larger analysis on. Next slide, please. I’m gonna let this play through. This is a newly released video, you’ll notice there are two dots moving back and forth, there is a plane at the bottom that’s moving across the screen. And now there are three dots moving back and forth. The moving back and forth, is from the sensor and the platform that’s collecting it. This is a a p3 on a training mission in the western United States. They picked these up and they tried to intercept and was unable to intercept them. Apart from that motion, and you’ll see a little bit of defocusing from the sensor itself. There is no other oddity about this, except for the fact that they couldn’t catch them. The reason they couldn’t catch them is because after further analysis, it was shown that those objects were actually much farther away from the p3 than they thought. And in fact, when we went even deeper looked at air traffic control data, we were able to match those two aircraft on a major flight corridor heading into a major airport for landing. This is the kind of thing that can spoof and or provide misperception of both very highly trained pilots, as well as sensors. Right, and this was reported as an odd grouping of three UAP. That is not to say that the pilots didn’t know what they were looking at, or they, they knew what they were looking at, but they weren’t really sure. But it also is meant to say that when they’re not sure they’re reporting it now. And that’s what they’re supposed to be doing. And then we have to go look at it. Next slide, please. That brings us to really what is AARO doing in the science and technical realm. So this is one of those areas that I want to expound a little bit more on than we did in the last hearings. AARO has a robust scientific plan that we are required to then provide to Congress here pretty soon.
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 38:16
One of the first things that we’re doing is looking across all the existing sensor data against that typical UAP target that I gave you up at the very first slide that goes beyond DOD and icy sensors that’s commercial, that’s civil, that’s and with partnership with NASA, when NASA centers, and NOAA sensors, understanding if any of these Earth sensing satellites, any of these airborne platforms, any of these ground radars, whether it’s FAA or other can actually see these things. Given what we’ve got so far is going to be an important first step to understanding what sensors are going to be relevant. From there, we will we are augmenting with dedicated sensors that we’ve purpose built, designed to detect, track and characterize those particular objects. And we will be been putting those out in very select areas for surveillance purposes. Partnerships with academia exploring the signatures to match to our data. So understanding if a thing is moving and if it is doing certain anomalous activities, what are the signatures we would expect to see? How do we pull on that? And then from there, how do I tune my collection architecture to go after statistical analytic techniques? We’re working with a couple of universities on how do I do broader base statistical analysis on unclassified and classified data so that I can apply those analytics to our holdings and then AI and ML analytic techniques for searching out through the data. What are this what are the objects were the targets that we’re going after? We have partnerships with both DOD and Doa labs to explore our current state of the art fundamental physics of UAP observations, both current and historical. In other words, if I have objects, those few that are doing some things that are anomalous, what is our current understanding of maneuverability? Speed? Signature management, propulsion? What are those underlying signatures that we would expect to see? And how do I then pull on that? Our interagency and allied partnership shifts for calibration of our capabilities. This is exactly what David was pointing out. The vast majority of what we have reported to us are DoD sensors. DOD sensors are not scientific sensors. They are not intelligence community sensors. Believe it or not, intelligence community sensors are very close to scientific sensors, they are calibrated, they are high precision, they are everything you’d ever want to know about a thing. DOD sensors have one purpose they are to identify an object that is known and put a weapon on it. That is what they’re for. Right, predominantly. So understanding how do you calibrate those against these known objects? How do I fly an F 35, against a weather balloon at different speeds in different altitudes and different sun conditions and different lighting conditions and heating conditions. Those are all important measurements that need to be done. And we are on the in process of doing that right now. That table on the right is a very simplified version of our entire test matrix, which you would not be able to fit on three of these slides against all of our sensors across all of those phenomenologies. That will be useful in order to then train our operators, pilots and sensors against the known objects. And then finally, our pattern of life analysis. This is essentially baselining. What is normal, I have all these hotspot areas, but we only have hotspot areas, because that’s when the reports come in from the operators that are operating at that time. They don’t operate all the time. So to have a 24/7 collection monitoring campaign, in some of these areas for three months at a time is going to be necessary in order to measure out what is normal, then I’ll know what is not normal, right when we have additional things that come through those spaces. And that includes space and maritime. Next slide, please. Which brings me to some of my recommendations for the panel. And their consideration and deliberation. of some of these we’re going to be exploring with our new NASA embed. I’m happy to be welcoming on for your pretty soon who’s going to help us in our scientific plan. Crowd crowdsourcing unclassified open source data, this is where you know some of the public can be helpful. You know, imagery from a iPhone is generally not helpful unless you are right up on whatever it is you’re looking at. However, some of the ancillary data that your iPhone provides from location to speed to other phenomenologies and more than one of those can be very helpful. Large scale ground based scientific instrumentation evaluating how can I use some of these other instruments for detection? The FRB example was was perfect, right. You have a bunch of large scales, instruments that were not designed for that yet they pick them up because there was a microwave? Well, we have a a surrogate target package of what we think these things are, at least from a what we’ve got reported to us that was in the front slide. Understanding how can I evaluate that against all of these other instruments? And do any of them have a chance of picking anything up that would be helpful in tipping and cueing us to get other sensors on target? I think leading that evaluation of the scientific ground based sensors would be useful. Also the same thing for the earth sciences satellites as we mentioned before. Intentional vise coincidental collection. So looking at how can I provide a tip and cue to both the ground and space based scientific and academic sensor community to put additional sensors on a object when it is reported? I’m currently doing that With AARO, the Joint Staff the commands for when they get tip in queue. Right? So a pilot says something, they see something they reported in, and we’re going to turn on a whole bunch of new collection to go after, I should be able to hand that same tip in queue to the scientific and academic community. So looking at how that works would be helpful. peer reviewing advanced capabilities, the parameterization and the publication of that that have not yet been engineered, we understand a lot of fundamental physics. It is the scientific community’s responsibility to explore and document those fundamentals in peer reviewed scientific journals to match to data so that we can weed out all kinds of different hypotheses. Right? That’s how science works, we need to make sure that we are doing that. I think leading that conversation would be very helpful from NASA’s perspective, archived scientific data. So we have a whole bunch of calibrated large scale scientific data from all these different instrumentations around the world. Taking a look at how can you apply some maybe some AI ml tools to search through that data for anomalous signatures that may correlate to things that we’ve got reporting on? That would be an interesting study, distributions of sightings, I think this is a low hanging fruit one, right. So if we take a look at all of the distributions of sightings that are outside of my national security areas that I’ve got classified reporting for, and they generate the similar distribution map as we’ve gotten, and we put those two pieces together, and now I have a holistic picture. And then, of course, our foreign partnerships, building a robust scientific community of interest review, data, capabilities, conduct analysis, expanding upon, you know, our military and intelligence collaborations across the world, into the scientific and academic world. And with that, those were my thoughts. We’ve talked about some of these in the past, it would be interesting to hear if there’s any further questions or deliberations on any of those points. And I’m happy to take any questions that you all have.
David Spergel 47:21
Great. Thank you, Dr. Kirkpatrick. And I also want to you take this opportunity to thank you in the ARL, for your openness in providing this committee with insight and information about what you’ve learned so far, how we could work together, I think this is very much an area where it’s going to be essential that NASA be your partner and be a good partner for a row. And I think you’re really want to thank you for your role with this committee, and helping to start to build that partnership. In my pleasure. And let’s register. Sure, thanks for the question.
Reggie Brothers 48:00
We talked a little more data already. Let’s talk about sensors for some time. So you mentioned that you were labs academia. Do you see a need to go beyond what you mentioned earlier? That is the type of sensor that we have right now, which are based on national security threats? And so phenomenologies and frequency range of these kinds of things. You see reasonable and beyond that? Yep, absolutely. What what are some challenges and see their materials?
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 48:26
So can we go back to the front slide to the first slide where the target characterization is. So we’ve we’ve purpose built a couple of, of sensors to do search, across that note, down one, there you go, that’s great. To go down some of those characteristics to see if we can find them correlated to pilot reporting. Some of those are, initially this is going to be I’m gonna say this is a bootstrap method, right? We’re doing a broad spectrum search across very few indicators that we can point to, that will allow enable us to get a little bit more data or find that narrow those sensors and go from there. So we aren’t just relying on the DOD and icy sensors that exist today. Because frankly, they don’t point to where we want them to point. Right. I mean, I’ll be frank with with everyone. We we can point the largest collection apparatus in the entire globe at any point we want. You just have to tell me where I want to point it. The second piece of that is a lot of what we have is, is around the continental United States. Most people including the government, don’t like it when I point our entire collection apparatus to your backyard. Right, it’s not allowed. We have some laws about that. And we’ve got to figure out how to do this only in the areas that that I can get high confidence, there’s going to be something there. And high confidence, I’m not going to break any laws doing it. Right. So there’s a, there’s a trade there. So some of these ground base point detectors are going to be necessary for that to point up to point out to search, coupled with, we’re evaluating a number of sensor opportunities across different organizations, academia, industry, whatnot, that that already exist or are being built for similar purposes, or maybe other purposes that I might be able to recalibrate for this, and see if those will have a chance of of seeing that target. Right. So that’s where the modeling and sim comes in, can I can I take that target, put it into your sensor, and have a chance of seeing it? If I can, then I might want to use it.
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 51:04
Or you go,
Nadia Drake 51:08
Thanks, Shawn, I have the questions you probably don’t want, which are about numbers, unless I missed them. During your presentation, you had said that only a very small percentage of your cases display signatures that could be anomalous, and then follow that up with a few objects that do demonstrate potentially anomalous characteristics. What numbers are we talking about? How big is your database? How many years? Was it collected over? And are those observations made? And then by few, what do you mean,
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 51:37
right? Now? That’s a great question. So this chart, as I mentioned, we’ve updated with our current data holdings. At the time of my open hearing, we were at 650. Cases ish, we are now over 800. We are putting together our annual report, which will be due August one to the hill. And in it and there will be an unclassified version, as there always has been, we will have those updated numbers at that time, we roughly get I mean, you can do the math, you know, it depends anywhere from from 50 to 100 ish new reports a month. Now, the reason we had such a big jump recently is because I got FAA data integrated. And finally, and so we ended up with like 100 and some odd new cases. So there’s, there’s reason why it’s going to fluctuate the numbers that I would say, so we’re gonna we’re gonna try to do a little more of fidelity on some of the analytics when we report out. But the numbers I would say that we see are possible, you really anomalous are less than single digit percentages of those, that total database, so maybe two to five ish percent.
Jen Buss 53:21
All right. I’ll stand up because on the other end of the room, Thanks, Shawn, for your presentation, and for the some of the video footage that we saw. While we’re all good scientists on this panel, I think that I look at it with an untrained eye of looking at that video. And so I see three spots moving. And everything else in the background looks like it’s stable. Can you talk a little bit more about either the sensor platform or what we’re seeing that stable in the background? Because they’ve been identified as airplanes? And there’s clear description of from other data sources that came in to help clarify that. But when I look at this, what are all of the white spots in the background that we’re seeing that
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 54:03
are stable? So those are these that’s a star background? Pretty sure that star background now, so you’re looking at those planes were roughly 30 to 40 ish miles away, if I remember correctly, and when you see that smaller plane that comes in at the bottom. That one was much, much closer. It was like maybe six to 10 miles away. Right? And so the jitter in the sensor is what you’re looking at.
Jen Buss 54:46
Right Okay, so the three spots because they look like they’re moving at about the same rate. They are right and if they were flying together, but they’re not is what I’m hearing.
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 54:58
They’re in the center They’re in a flight line. Right? So they’re equally spaced in a flight line and the sensor is jittering. Thank you. Yes. Appreciate that. Yes. Wait, wait. He’s been Walter has been waiting, patiently waiting. Okay, if
Walter Scott 55:14
you go to your first slide, if you don’t mind, not the title slide, but the trends, trends. Yeah. It’s the previous slide. There you go. Thank you. So I want to make sure I understand the slide it says typically reported characteristics. And there are a bunch of things here, like for example, size, altitude speed, if it’s being observed from a single sensor, use the example of like the airplanes that were coming in. And if you don’t know how far away they are, how do you assess the size? Right? How do you assess the speed? This is what people would report but it isn’t necessarily what is the real size of the object? Or the speed or the the rest of it? Do I understand that correctly?
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 55:57
Partially. So yeah, this is not all single sensor observations. Some of these are very much multi sensor observations. And this is parameterised to cover the range of things for any given parameter range of what’s possible and what is then observed.
Walter Scott 56:18
Okay, and then on the next slide, the one where you’ve got the order is the meatball moving across the spray that one. So was there any look at sensor artifact data processing artifact? In the first thing that whenever I say anything that’s anomalous, I look at how was the data collected?
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 56:45
Yeah. So yes, these are these are. So this is an EO sensor on MQ nine. And we understand that very, very well. Was that is that is a real object. Absolutely. And
Anamaria Berea 57:08
mentioned that partnership, Jamia, you also use AI ml techniques, or existing datasets? Or possibly some of them open source? Can you explain a little bit more what kind of AI ml techniques you’re using? Are these about anomaly detection, missing anything related to processing or using anything related to?
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 57:33
So we’re looking at a number of different capabilities that span I think, a lot of what you’ve just said, so we’ve got we haven’t applied it yet. We are researching how we’re going to apply it. So natural language processing for the reports from the pilots, absolutely. Target recognition. So I can train a model to look for that thing. And go back through all of our holdings and go hatch, give me how many of these you have, right? And then try to figure out what those are. So I have not put anything out there yet, or have not looked at anything yet for active targeting in real time. Because I don’t know exactly what I would train it to go look for. I just know what we have. So I want to get more confidence on what we have before I go and do that. Except for balloons. We’re trying to get rid of balloons as quickly as possible.
Mike Gold 58:39
So Shawn, I just wanted to begin by thanking you for your service to this nation, this committee, you don’t exactly have the easiest job in Washington.
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 58:45
No, I do not appreciate it. I’m glad to recognize that.
Mike Gold 58:49
We certainly do. I also want to commend you noting the international partnerships. Spain just signed the Artemis accords yesterday, increasing the membership to 25. I think that’s a global partnership that you could leverage. Only 170 more countries to go NASA. Everyone signed up. I just have two questions, one, relative to what Nadia was asking you about the number of anomalous phenomena. What makes it anomalous in your view, what is the phenomenology when you’re pulling those cases out? And saying this is truly unexplained? And then my second question would be relative to the stigma, how damaging is that in your view? And what in particular Do you think NASA can do to help remedy the situation?
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 59:35
As a great question, so I’m going to take the second one first, because I know we’re getting short on time. The stigma has improved significantly over the years since the Navy first took this on, some years ago. It is not gone and in fact, I would argue the stigma exists inside the leadership of all of our our buildings. Right, wherever that is. My team and I have also been subjected to lots of harassment, especially coming out of my last hearing. Because people don’t understand the scientific method and why, why we have to do the things we have to do. Right. And because we can’t just come out and say, you know, the greatest, the greatest thing that could happen to me is I could come out and say, Hey, I know where all these things are. Here you go. Alright, but I don’t, right. And it’s gonna take us time to research all that. When people want answers now, and so they are, they’re actually feeding the stigma by by exhibiting that kind of behavior to all of us. Right? That is, that is a bad thing. Where can NASA help I made that recommendation on NASA should lead the scientific discourse, we need to elevate this conversation. We need to have this conversation in an open environment like this, where we aren’t going to get harassed. Because this is a hard problem. It is a hard target problem, we need to understand what is the things that are in all of our domains, Ace are air under sea? And how do we make sense of that? Your first question on what makes it anomalous to me, we actually developed some definitions on all of these things. We gave it both to the White House into Congress, I think we’ve gotten some of that into law now. But essentially anomalous is anything that is not readily understandable by the operator or the sensor. Right, so is doing something weird, whether that’s maneuvering against the wind at Mach two with no apparent propulsion, or it’s going into the water, which we have, we have shown is not the case, that is actually a sensor anomaly that we’ve now figured out, and we’re going to be publishing all that. You know, those kinds of things, make anomalous signature. We’ll call it signature management. But it’s things that are not readily understandable in the context of, hey, I’ve got a thing that’s out in the light, it should reflect a certain amount of light. If it doesn’t reflect that amount of light, something weird.
David Spergel 1:02:37
We have time for one last question.
Shelley Wright 1:02:41
Recommended for in partnership with NASA. I’m curious, especially given your math, have you up AARO partnered with international agencies? And there’s other ways for reporting to your?
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 1:02:55
So that’s, that’s great question. I’m gonna expound on that just a little bit. So I have just held our first five eyes forum on this subject. Last week, I think it was earlier this week, I don’t know Dan, was there. And we have, you know, we’ve we’ve entered into discussions with our partners on data sharing, how do they do reporting? What kind of analysis can they help us with? What kind of calibration can they help us with? What can we help them with, and we’re establishing all of that right now. And they’re gonna end up, you know, sending their information and data to us to feed into the process that we’ve laid out for how we’re going to do all this. Beyond that, I have not had either the time or the bandwidth to do and that’s why I would look to NASA to expand the scientific and and, and academic relationships that they have across all of our allies and partners, on how can we bring them into the fold? That’s where I think there’s a lot of benefit to NASA taking lead on that.
David Spergel 1:04:10
Thank you. One, just clarification for people who don’t know, what are the five eyes?
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 1:04:15
Oh, I’m sorry. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the five eyes, those are the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. So those are the five partners.
David Spergel 1:04:29
Terrific. So thank you
David Spergel 1:04:39
so our next presentation is from Mike free on from the FAA. Talking about the FAA is rolling what’s learned
Mike Freie 1:04:54
would like to thank the panel for the opportunity to come and give an overview of the FAA and some data points are Around the FAA VHS mission, the date of the FAA provides to provide the frame you know, what are the surveillance systems that that we can bring to bear are there there’s data around those sensors as well as to frame the limitations of those, you know, Shawn talked about some of the data points that that are used and being integrated. So hopefully this will give you an overview of the FAS mission, as well as as well as those data points. Next slide please. So the the FAS mission is is quite large and complex. By by a factor of two we operate more commercial aircraft than any other country. I think we’re second only to Australia in total airspace, but largely because Australia has a very large oceanic volume that they’re responsible for for managing. So it is a very complex, very large National Airspace System. We have over 14,000 controllers 520 air traffic control towers, which are located at the highest density of airports, and I’ll refer to those as towers and subsequent slides. We have 147 terminal radar approach controls or tray cones, and those are manned control facilities at the high and medium density airports around the nation, as well as 21 air traffic control centers, which are which managed the control of air traffic in the enroute environment. There’s 19,000 over 19,000 airports 5000 Over 5000 of those are associated public airports with the remaining 14,000 Plus private airports. Next slide please. So the FAA is mission is primarily around safe and efficient control of manned aircraft that has been her our historical mission and remains our primary mission. Certainly, as we talked about a new entrance with UAS is and advanced Air Mobility and some of those things, there will be an evolution of the FAS mission to include safe operation of the NASS with those those new entrants, but the architecture and design of the NASS is is geared around safe and efficient control of aircraft, unmanned aircraft. The certainly the the commercial aspect to commercial flights are a primary focus of the agency, we certainly support general aviation and flights as well. But again, our mission is around manned aircraft and safe and efficient operation of those. The by the numbers, over 16 million flights, nearly 5400 flights at peak at given the peak time of any given day. 45,000 daily flights 25 million GA flight hours per year, very large, very complex operation that that we’re responsible for managing, we certainly provide a significant contribution to to that for that service to the nation in the form of product toward a GDP. Next slide. So as we get into the discussion of surveillance services, I want to provide a little bit of framework around the categorization of our surveillance services. And we primarily break those into two, two bodies. The cooperative surveillance, which is defined by an A sensor, that’s avionics equipment on board, the aircraft that works in conjunction with ground based sensors, the noncooperative surveillance is independent this is basically the classic radar RF energy is transmitted out, reflects off the target and we receive a signal and from that return, we can determine where that there that aircraft is. Typically, these cooperative and noncooperative sensors are co located together, one cooperative mounted on top of the noncooperative radar. So for the purpose from a data perspective, I think in this panel in a study, I think that the Coopera sensors, those are neither unknown or anomalous. So for the purposes of this, this briefing of the rest of this briefing, I’m going to focus on the non cooperative aspect. Next slide, please. So, the, again, from the standpoint of the mission of the FAA around again, is primarily around manned aircraft. And I think that sort of serves as an important framework for the data points and the type of data that we can bring to bear for this panel. So we break our systems and the design of the systems into different types of systems. So we have short range radars, which are typically located at the high and medium density airports. And those operate from a range they have a detection range of between 40 and 60 miles and an altitude detection capability of about 24,000 feet. The long range radar systems have a detection range of two to 250 nautical miles with altitude detection up to 100,000 feet. So that provides the basic the framework for for those, I will mention the automatic dependent surveillance broadcast or ATSB, not only from the context that that does serve as a primary data source and a preferred data source for the management of the Airspace System. But it is a cooperative system. And for the purposes of the next slides as I get into the discussion of the coverage and the type of detection for those non cooperative targets, it is not considered as part of those. And also surface surveillance is also something that we provide but again, for the purpose of the study, I only include those for just a completeness perspective. The one final point on as I talk about manned aircraft and primary mission for the drones and balloons and things of that nature, their basic premise is to operate and not to interfere bases that they are not to interfere with manned operations. And that’s that’s a fundamental aspect as we talk to the data and what we can and can detect with respect to those non manned non manned systems. Next slide please. Realize that this is an eye chart because I would want it to provide just a graphical or pictorial depiction of where our sensors are located. The green, blue and pink balloons if you will, represent our short range radars, those are located at at airports, those are where those are sited, the the two reddish balloons to have letters in them a four and a C. Those represent our long range radars, the Arthur fours and Carcer systems that are used in the context of both from an air traffic control perspective as well as for a national defense and homeland security mission. And the the perimeter, the Arthur fours are located around the perimeter of the country equally spaced and the carceral systems are located on the interior of the US. I will point out that this only depicts the CONUS there are systems at ATC both short range and Long Range Systems, Hawaii, Alaska and Caribbean. Those are not depicted here. I don’t think they were necessary for the the purpose of understanding that surveillance. And I will also point out that both for this slide and the subsequent coverage slide we do not talk to any classified DoD or DJ systems than an operation. Next slide please.
Federica Bianco 1:13:09
So what it is, what can the FAA detect and surveil what can get me not this slide gives you a by altitude slice of what it is that we can detect. So if you look at the square that’s labeled 1000 foot AGL that depicts by sensor for an aircraft that is 1000 feet in altitude, what is the range at which we can detect that aircraft and so on as you get higher in altitude or further higher and altitude, you can detect it at further range and that’s basically a phenomena of the curvature of the earth and the line of sight aspect of these these radar systems. So, pretty good coverage across the US at 10,000 feet and above. This is a mathematical model based of a pure line of sight, as well as some geographical screening as you can see in the western part of the US there are there is screening due to the mountains and those sensors need to take a little bit of time and talk about the the nature of the targets these line of sight models represent an input of a target that is one square meter to think of a sphere of one meter in diameter. That’s the assumption that goes into these models. So if you think about that, in the context of other forms or aircraft, a fourth generation F 15 or F 18 is in the product proximity of about one square meter, perhaps a little bit larger. A large airliner is perhaps 100 square meters. A small UAS is perhaps one or point 01 square meter. So the range of these detections are there are the size and the ability to check these targets from an F 15. A large airliner, 100 times larger in size, a drone 100 times smaller in size. So the detection of an A surveillance capability really largely depends in part to the target that we’re talking about and the ability to surveil that target. Next line. So I do include this ADB ADSB coverage lie detector to give a context of from a cooperative perspective, there is very good coverage across the US to without 1500 feet above ground level. So this provide a context of what when we look at the data and start getting a discussion of what it is we can detect this will certainly for those cooperative aircraft that have ADSP, we can certainly detect those to a pretty pretty low altitude across across the US. All right, a couple of data points, I think, I know Shawn certainly talked about some of the data points and I can provide a little bit of insight. From an FA perspective. drones and drones are pretty significant challenge. As 880,000 registered drones in the US a small drones I should say, part one of seven drones. Many 10s of 1000 of those are operate operated on a daily basis for by commercial operators. It’s not clear how many private drone operators are taking their their drone up for a quick flight. But as I said earlier, those are regulated by the regulated to operate below 400 feet and altitude. So again, it’s the drone aspect is for those small drones in particular, as well as all of our classes of drones. There are regulatory restrictions to where they can and cannot fly basically avoiding and not interfering with manned aircraft operations. second data point we talked about balloons, the weather service, we know 190 or 92. Weather Stations are released balloons twice a day. It’s 6am and 00 100, Zulu and 1200. Zulu, typically two hour duration they fly up to 100,000 feet where the the envelope bursts and then the payload descends back back to Earth. So certainly 100 At least 184 balloon flights daily in the NASS you know not to consider universities and hobbyist balloons that may be launched, but those are typically small, small in size. And finally, Sean did talk about UAPs and FAA data, a couple of data points that we do report there is a process by which air traffic controllers can report UAP sightings or, or events. Historically, those have been in the range of about three to five reports per month that have been reported. We did see an uptick of reports in August of 22. That went up to about eight to 10 Perhaps due to start like Starlink launches. And finally the with the Chinese weather, or the Chinese balloon incidents in February, we did see a significant uptick and uptick and there’s like 68 UAP reports that that started in February. And we’ve seen a large number, you know, subsequent to them to that. I think that’s all I had any questions?
David Spergel 1:18:39
You want to take quick? It’s easy. You can choose the questioners it’s easy.
Walter Scott 1:18:44
Alright. So two questions. Two questions about the radar data coverage. First one is do you retain any of the data? Or is it just cycled over as
Federica Bianco 1:18:57
there is a retention and long term retention of data? I can’t recall exactly how long we retain that is certainly a requirement from a retention from, like legal perspective. Exactly. But I do know there is some periodicity in a measured and determined months
Walter Scott 1:19:16
retained in terms of like the raw radar or is some processed form of data that’s retained. I believe
Federica Bianco 1:19:23
it’s a process form of data that is what was displayed on the whether it’s an Indian route, ie RAM system or the star system.
Walter Scott 1:19:31
And then the other question is for the radars, are they operated in any sort of a tasked mode or are they constant search
Federica Bianco 1:19:40
the current systems in our inventory, just their their fixed face and they just rotate at either 12 RPM or five RPM depending on whether it’s an enroute or terminal surveillance? Thanks. All right. Next question. As
Warren Randolph 1:19:55
you mentioned, three to five reports from month
Federica Bianco 1:20:00
per month, that is three to five reports per month for all the controllers and all of us. So there’s a process by which if they see something and they want to report that they can go with to report that to the, the Den we call it but report, Hey, I saw something I don’t know what it was sets three to five per month across the entire 14,000 controllers per month. So, you know, 45,000 operations, any given day, 30 months, 30 days, however many days in a month, you know, it’s a very small percentage.
Federica Bianco 1:20:38
Can you describe actually about this? How do you do you encourage to report? Do you feel like the stigma on UAPs is impairing the reporting? Bias?
Federica Bianco 1:20:50
I’m not aware of all answer it this way. The the process by which UAP is reported is part of the air traffic controller order. So basically, the aircraft controllers are allowed that says, you know, if you see something, here’s a process by which the procedure by which you would report it. Other than that, I’m not aware of any any specific stigma or, or limitations and really brought brought in a good position to, you know, to speak to that other than there is that process, and that is the process that we use to and is what represents those numbers I talked to?
Federica Bianco 1:21:27
And if I may have had a question prior to this one, how do you, beside the sites where you deploy, you saw the map and has some very good coverage on the coastal areas, there were some areas of lack of coverage.
Federica Bianco 1:21:38
So if we went if you go back, go back one slide from what’s presented here, the what you’ll see is in the eastern half of the US, there’s a lot better coverage. But that’s because there’s a lot more population in the east, and therefore a lot more airports. And these systems are historically cited at the airport in support of those those airport operations to the west, obviously, oops, see less and less dense and fewer systems. Now the that’s from an ASR, the short range radar perspective, the long range radars are pretty much equally spaced to provide in order to provide the maximum coverage from a Homeland Defense and Security perspective as well as with a higher altitude flights the enroute crews phase of air traffic control.
Warren Randolph 1:22:33
More, Mike, first, thank you in the FAA, for coming to share this information with us. Second, I can you speak to a little bit of the filtering techniques that we use. So with respect to AI, no alternative question about the raw data and process, but can you just talk a little bit about, we actually
Federica Bianco 1:22:49
aren’t trying to detect everything? You know, that’s actually a very good question and a very good point with respect to what we can and cannot see. So there are, you know, the closer to the ground, you point a radar certainly can get lower elevations, but you also start to see the effects of trees and other ground based clutter, as we call it, that starts to interfere. So we have great ability to detect a lot of things but but from an FAA mission perspective, our desire is to find that sweet spot of seeing everything to as low and altitude as we can to maximize our mission around safe operations of manned aircraft, and how to pull that thread just a little bit further. You know, there’s also limitation with respect to biologicals or insects and dust and things of this this flavor that most aircraft fly above a certain speed. So we typically will have filtering settings on our systems to get rid of the stuff that really is leaves or insects or things of that nature. So that we provide as clean a display for the controllers. So there are specific settings that we can can adjust. And it’s been learned over many years to perfect those, what we call optimization of those kinds of filters to get rid of what is not a manned aircraft, not an aircraft, and provide as clean a display for the controllers as we can. Yes.
Reggie Brothers 1:24:20
Thank you, thanks for the presentation. Would it be a farm what would you say more would be possible to to collect the raw data? But to say that because if it would be possible to do some calibration after the fact that Shawn was mentioning, for example, you might be to capture the phenomenology. Is it possible?
Federica Bianco 1:24:39
Well, when you say raw data, I think you’d have we’d have to talk a little bit about what is meant. So you know what, from a technical perspective, pure, we’ll be we’ll call Inq data is huge, huge, you know, gigabyte, very, very, very large volumes of data. That would probably be cost prohibitive. We certainly don’t do that today. The there are, again, we do record data, but it is effectively the data that is has been through some form of these processes in these filter rings. We do that today. But it certainly within the time and money, we could certainly collect that data and I think it would, but it would be, we’d have to look at the challenge of, of how we would go about modifying the systems or introducing new ways to collect that that raw data as you as you described, certainly, it’s feasible. It’s possible. But it’s not without technical challenge. Yes,
Reggie Brothers 1:25:35
184 balloon flights daily, are those characters, or they just you just know, they do that, and then they end up with it.
Federica Bianco 1:25:41
So under the balloon, I’ll call it part 101. The regulations for balloons, there’s very specific requirements. So for National Weather Service, before they release those, they’ll contact a local air traffic facility, they’re gonna say, here’s what time I’m going to release it. And when they release it, they have tracking. And they provide that tracking to the air traffic control facility. Throughout the flight of that particular balloon, there are commercial balloons that are also launched. But those most for the most part, as I understand that have, they actually transmit their GPS position in support of where they’re flying so as to ensure they’re not interfering with with air traffic, and to ensure that air traffic controllers are aware of where those those balloons are operating? Yes, ma’am.
Shelley Wright 1:26:28
So, we’ve talked about recording the three to five, from air traffic control, but what about from the noncooperative surveillance that they’ve been anomalies from the sensors themselves? And if so, what is the process for that?
Federica Bianco 1:26:43
I say the FAA mission is not around anomalies with the noncooperative sensors themselves. So as we build an air traffic control picture, we have both the noncooperative systems which detects the target, we have a cooperative system that also detects a target, and we will tend to merge those those targets together. And so when our controllers display, they’ll know is this a nonprofit only, or merged or combined target. So they they know, you know, basically, an increased level of confidence that on what it is they’re seeing is, in fact, a real aircraft. So we don’t make any real distinction between a non cooperative and a cooperative, other than how they get combined and put on a controllers display. So I don’t know if that answered your. So so like a GA flight that doesn’t notice flying visual flight rules, those will just be picked up by the FAA, even if they don’t, if they’re not equipped with with a court with a cooperative avionics, those would just be picked up by the non cooperative system, that if they happen to surveil where that aircraft is fine, and so that certainly will be put on the controllers display. And they will be able to provide awareness. In fact, there’s a flight following procedure by which GA pilots can ask for, hey, I’m not, I’m not squawking. I don’t have a corporate system. But please help me and just through via the radio, I’m going to go on from here to here and in providing awareness, situational awareness, if the controller has the bandwidth to to provide that data,
David Spergel 1:28:24
when most questions.
Mike Gold 1:28:26
So I’m not a scientist, I’m a recovering attorney. And I love process. And few questions there. If I’m a pilot, where do I find that process for reporting UAPs? Where’s that articulated or captured? Second, when you mentioned that you’re reporting these incidents? Who are you reporting it to? And are those incidents pulling on the thread that registered? Are they being archived anywhere?
Federica Bianco 1:28:47
I believe they are archived, they reported to the domestic network event Network is an NFA organization or function? I don’t I can’t speak to whether for whether they would be say part of what Shawn would would include as part of his database, I presume so. So I think that was answered the second question, was the first question again, I’m sorry,
Mike Gold 1:29:12
where does the reporting process live? If I’m a pilot, I see a new IP where do I go to find
Federica Bianco 1:29:17
that? I don’t know the answer to that question. I said, I’m familiar with the reporting process from a controller perspective and the order that’s that use to define how controllers do their job? I am not I don’t know the answer to the question from a pilot perspective.
David Spergel 1:29:35
Great, so thank you, Mike, for your presentation and for all the help the FAA has given us as we’ve been learning more about the very impressive system that the FAA maintains. Thank you. I know. You know, for me, one of the many takeaways from this is filling it, you know, just a little bit safer. Every time I fly. I’m thankful for you and your colleagues for what they do to make that possible. And Yep. And we’re now going to take a quick lunch break, we’ll be back at 1230. And see you all soon. The next part of our sessions, series of short presentations by members of the panel on their thoughts on different aspects of our charge. And the format is we’re going to have them come up to the podium and speak. And I’m going to ask each of the speakers then to take questions. It’s actually the angle with this setup, as you can see the people better from the podium than I can where it’s hard to see people behind you. I’m going to try to keep manage the time. So as those questions, you know, come to an end, I’ll cut you off and bring up the next speaker. And we’ll move through the the six topics and then we’ll have some time at the end for some general discussion. The first speaker will be Dr. Nadia Drake, talking about framing the issue of UAP.
Nadia Drake 1:31:10
Hello, and welcome back from lunch, everybody, and welcome to those of you watching us virtually, I’m Nadia. I am a scientist by training. I’m also a science journalist now. And my job is to try and synthesize the information that we’ve learned so far, and summarize the situation. So if you will put together a framework for thinking about UAP. Now I’m going to try and do this in a way that reflects the thoughts of the entire panel, although obviously we have a variety of opinions and ideas among us. So I’d like to leave some time at the end for you to weigh in with disagreements or concurrences as needed. So first housekeeping matter, the definition of UAP changed during the seven months of our fact finding process. UAP initially stood for unidentified aerial phenomena with aerial referring to events occurring in Earth’s atmosphere that is now defined as anomalous which includes the space air and undersea domains. As a panel, I think we have decided to continue focusing our recommendations on the aerial domain because that is where the majority of sightings and events have occurred. And also because we couldn’t fully pivot to address the expanded scope of the new acronym. Beyond that, there are three points I want to make. The first is that for a number of reasons UAP are obviously quite interesting. Right? That is why we are here. Recently, many credible witnesses have reported seeing unidentified objects in the sky, some of which are behaving rather peculiar Lily peculiarly. In some instances, these reports include corroborating data from various instruments, various sensors. The challenge that we have, is that the data needed to explain these anomalous sightings often do not exist, or incomplete for generating a conclusive analysis. This includes eyewitness reports, which on their own can be interesting and compelling, but often lack the information needed to make definitive conclusions about an object’s provenance. We as a panel are thinking about the types of data that might add value to those reports, and which could be useful on their own. As a corollary to date, in the refereed scientific literature, there is no conclusive evidence suggesting an extra terrestrial origin for UAP. Collecting more good data for the scientific community to review and a peer reviewed context will be important for progress to be to be made here. Second point UAP offer an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the power of the scientific method and of empirically addressing a question using a multidisciplinary approach. It is our job as a panel to make some recommendations about how NASA might go about tackling this topic scientifically, taking advantage of the agency’s resources, global outreach and reputation. Key points to keep in mind here are that science is hypothesis science is hypothesis driven. Scientists build confidence in their theories, by relying on well calibrated well collected data, using well established methods with rigorous evaluation and independent corroboration. In science, skepticism is not a bias, nor is it a bad word. It is not our job to define nature, but to study it in ways that let nature reveal itself to us. Regardless of how exciting or disappointing that reality might be. And to that end, when we’re thinking about making recommendations about how NASA can tackle this topic scientifically, I think it’s important to remember that it’s not NASA’s job to replicate the efforts of the department of defense, but rather to consider approaches that are complementary and to what the all domain anomaly resolution office is doing. And so one of the questions that we as a panel, I think need to center is what can we recommend that NASA can do that the DoD cannot? Third point to that, and what are we even looking for? How are we defining this problem? And how do the available data define what seems to be to borrow a cliche, a very slender needle in a very big haystack. We heard a little bit about that today from Dr. Kirkpatrick, who reported that there have been 800 events collected over about 27 years. And between two and 5% of those events display signatures that could be anomalous, defined as anything that is not readily understandable by the operator or the sensor, something that is doing something weird, Mr. Free, and some of the experts on our panel have to find the background on which those events exist, the amount of stuff in the sky at any given time, like so. On average, FAA, air traffic control handles 45,000 flights per day in US airspace, with 5400 aircraft in the sky at peak time. Worldwide. On average, there are about 1600 weather balloon launches per day. In the US there are at least 184 of those balloons launched. And that doesn’t include private companies or research flights. There are about 1.6 9 million recreational or model small uncrewed aircraft systems, and an additional 880,000 Drones are registered for commercial use. And these are not controlled by air traffic control. And they are not scheduled flights. So that’s our challenge. So when making recommendations as a panel, I think we need to look at what kind of imprint we want to leave. What does the situation look like five years from now? What does it look like 10 years from now? Why are we making these recommendations? We heard a little bit about this this morning, from both Mike and David, who noted that many discoveries in science are rooted in initially unexplained and bizarre phenomena. So by carefully scrutinizing the sky or however, we end up defining our search space, and by collaborating across disciplines, we are likely to learn new things about our planet. That’s a fact. And that’s the commensal science case we might want to consider when making recommendations here. All right. Does anyone have thoughts,
David Spergel 1:37:29
questions, thoughts, comments? Currently,
Karlin Toner 1:37:37
I guess I’m gonna challenge a little bit. We take from time to time legislation required. And I’m not sure we’ve precluded anything beyond the aerial for this panel. And so I’m just very sad because mustard for us, even though mostly what we’ve seen, and I think national is NASA’s mission space, looking for the Aerial?
Nadia Drake 1:38:02
I agree with you. And I think that is a parameter that we need to define as a panel.
Dan Evans 1:38:08
Yeah, I’ll just quickly jump in and echo some remarks I made this morning that yes, the age change from aerial to anomalous. But it’s also accurate to say that the preponderance of events are in the areal domain. That being said, your panel scope has expanded outwards. And I think we’ll hear a little bit from David later on that very subject.
David Spergel 1:38:30
When I think anomalous, people often think about it as going down and including ocean. But I think what’s very relevant for NASA is going out. Right, and, you know, looking at things in our solar system, and I think, in some sense, I think there’s certain responsibilities in you know, we look at airspace, there’s FAA responsibilities, there’s DoD responsibilities, as you get further and further away from the Earth. Eventually, it’s all NASA once you get up, you know, towards most certainly much of the solar system and out to our galaxy, the tour NASA, and when we start thinking about things like, you know, and this will be David, we’ll get to this observations beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. I think this change in language lets us also think about our you know, further out in the solar system as well. Other thoughts? Great. Did
Nadia Drake 1:39:37
I summarize everything totally, accurately Awesome.
Paula Bontempi 1:39:54
All right. All right. Thank you. So I thought that was the perfect To intro and segue by Dr. Drake for addressing why NASA what, what is or what are NASA’s roles in UAP studies. So, NASA primarily is a science driven agency. It’s committed to exploring and understanding air and space. And this includes, as we were just discussing the unknown, right? Whether that’s the farthest reaches of the Universe, or right here on our home planet. In that light, NASA has over 60 years of experience measuring phenomena in air in space in space, an air that might be aeronautics, astronomy, as well as measuring other Earth phenomena, and this may include aquatic or atmospheric phenomena as well. And they do this using the unique vantage point of space. NASA’s mission, data and technical expertise in science and engineering may also help investigate and understand any of the reported phenomena. It makes sense to explore what new observations or measurements or studies might contribute to the understanding of reported phenomena. In that light, Dr. Fox made this point this morning, there’s a tremendous archive of NASA data. These are from satellites and other space based and ground networks as well as other assets. And these are freely and openly available to the public. Now NASA research as was mentioned also supports a wide range of methods. This includes advanced data analysis, modeling, cutting edge, computational and data visualization tools, and these are all useful for investigating unexplained observations, which may be crucial in studying these phenomena. discoveries and results are all publicly available. And this can be something from the characterization of extra terrestrial solar planets or the hole in the ozone layer. And these are communicated publicly through many outlets through the agency. NASA also has a long standing public trust. This is essential to communicate those findings about phenomena to the public. And as was mentioned several times very important to destigmatize the reporting and raise awareness of cultural and social barriers to doing so. NASA has a unique strength in leveraging public and private partnerships that could result in new technologies that may be useful in observing and understanding reported phenomena. These partners could include other federal agencies we’ve heard from the FAA today, as well as NOAA was identified. And they may collect data that could help to understand reported phenomena. In addition, NASA has a strong record of international collaboration, which could be beneficial to study any of these phenomena as that may require global cooperation and data sharing. And then, one thing that really strikes me is that new understanding of anomalous events really comes from when we bring communities together interdisciplinary communities that would not necessarily collaborate. And in my world, that might be biological and physical oceanographers. And I tell people to think a little more broadly, what if we brought together astronomers and scientists like we did on this panel. So that those interdisciplinary research teams as well as citizen scientists could explore historical and current NASA and partner data for events or more importantly for environmental conditions around the time of reported events. And this may help in our understanding. And then finally, given us his experience with long term missions, long term projects in scientific focus, the agency is really well equipped to handle the extensive and ongoing study of phenomena investigation that this likely requires. So hopefully, that gave you some thoughts as to why NASA I don’t know if any of my fellow panelists agree or disagree. Discuss. Yes,
Federica Bianco 1:44:25
Apollo, thank you. So NASA has a great visibility in the community and not and UAVs are obviously of great interest to a very diverse range of people. So can you speak a bit about the opportunity that this provides for NASA to expand, you know, the knowledge or the understanding of the scientific method?
Paula Bontempi 1:44:46
Yes. So it’s a great question. There are multiple opportunities, I think, UAP present. The first as I mentioned, I think is to bring together interdisciplinary research teams and scientists and citizen scientists to really take a look at with a an objective and perhaps unique eye. What the NASA Data Archive actually means blending the partnerships, a renewed partnership that’s at the federal, the International and the private level. Right. So I think there are any number of pathways that people could pursue that could be really advantageous for helping us to understand what’s happening with any reported UAP.
Shelley Wright 1:45:34
questions. Thank you, Paula. This is jelly. Right. Actually, my question and comment actually goes to both you and Nadia. Dr. Kirkpatrick gave us a definition of anomalous that was that it was not readily understandable to the operator of the sensor. And from the NASA perspective, and we’re a panel, I think we have to consider a broader definition if we’re talking about citizen science. And I’m curious of how we incorporate that, especially within the communication avenues that we were just discussing.
Paula Bontempi 1:46:11
It’s a good question. So not all data in an archive are user friendly, right, right out of the gate. But I think NASA does an excellent job. Making things like quick look or browse products available, you can go on the NASA website, you can look at different aspects of different things that the agency has its mission to study. And I think, if nothing else, people have become a lot more in touch with their surroundings, and their environment and the changes happening there. And so I think there’s probably an opportunity for people to maybe not become overnight experts in how to process satellite data and use it for basic research in a complex fashion. But there are ways to utilize those data to look at your environment, if you think you’ve, you know, seen something or you wish to report something. So communication engagement in the public, I think is a really important part of the D stigmatization for short. Nadia, I don’t know if you have anything to add.
Nadia Drake 1:47:17
I was I was struck by the phrase not readily understandable. I felt like that was actually doing a lot of work. So I think for our purposes, we probably want to come up with a slightly more specific definition of what anomalous actually means. Yes, yeah.
David Spergel 1:47:37
Thanks, Federico, next.
Federica Bianco 1:47:48
Hello, everybody. My name is Federico Bianca. I am an astrophysicist and a data scientist and I bring this perspective to the panel. So for the next few minutes, I want to emphasize some of the things that my colleagues have already mentioned about the data, particularly the status of the data that exists, and what the data that we should collect, to really understand what maybe we’ve already heard in a few cases by a few people that NASA’s role is to explore the universe. Through the scientific method. The application of the scientific method to discovery requires that the data meets some standards that allow the data driven approach, and there are many standards that have been established in the scientific community over the years. I can mention one, for example, is called the fear standard, where fear stands for find the ability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability. The current status of the data about UAPs does not meet the standards. The data collection is inconsistent, it’s in our genes, it’s uncalibrated. They they are poorly documented, and largely incomplete. They’re also not enough systematically retrievable, which causes a problem in automation of the analysis. So what could benefit from data science and machine learning methods from artificial intelligence that is developing at a rapid pace, but machine learning and AI cannot be applied until the data meet the standards. Even to study a single event currently requires a significant lift in retrieving the data and the metadata that may or may not be available. And this lift is at the moment entirely personal power, which means that it cannot be automated to apply machine learning methods. Organized repositories need to exist to enable the automation of retrieval of the data and the metadata and this is a necessary premise to enable the systematic scientific approach. So the study of will UAPs anomaly detection is a well developed although notoriously hard discipline and which has seen tremendous advances recently with data science and machine learning. Usually, this means the Tag Team rare and unusual signals in a complex that is no Wizzy and rich with phenomena that we know. So there are two general approaches to anomaly detection in the scientific community. One is the following. If we know the signal that we expect, we can model it, and we can simulate it and maybe inject it in our data. So we can develop methods that are specific to finding those exact signals or signals that are similar to those. And we might be able to conceptualize signals coming from a physical system that responds to the laws of physics, as we know them, but we cannot comprehensively produce all possible signals that could relate to or explain UAPs. So, the alternative approach in detecting anomalies requires a thorough and deep understanding of what is normal and usual, to tease out what is unusual. And unlike the rest, these methods typically fall in the realm of what we call unsupervised machine learning. What is usual maybe the balloons the aircraft and wealth are natural phenomena that we have heard us and what is unusual what is an anomaly is anything that is not consistent with the way in which those things look in our data. Once the anomalous signal is detected, it can be studied in more depth either through the discovery data itself, but that may not be sufficient. So then we may need to collect additional data for to study these these anomalies. And this is something that in astrophysics, we typically refer to as follow up data. This can be very hard, especially if the phenomena that are anomalies are also ephemeral in time, so you have to promptly respond to the detection and set up follow up observations. It’s an extremely hard game, but it’s something that is seeing a large developing in astrophysics in recent years with the study of anomalous detections in the universe. This approach relies entirely on a comprehensive and systematic organization of the data, which is paramount and on a deep understanding of all the data that is actually usual and known. The data that we may want to collect ideally will be collected in a multi sensor and multi platform and multi site manner. I witnesses reports, I want to elevate what Dr. Drake said, cannot ascertain the nature of UAPs. However, they should be considered because they may contain important information. For example, persistent sampling locations are seasonality, but they only really work if join with quantitative data collected by sensors as well as your physical and psychophysical assessments of the witness and the impact that the experience has on them to really reveal the nature of UAPs. You’ve heard it from from my colleagues a number of times, the data needs to be collected by sensors they need to be calibrated or calibrated both. So we need to collect not only the data images, sound spectrum, characterization of what we see, but metadata, the sensor type, the brand, the brand of the sensor, the noise characteristics, time of the acquisition instrument sensitivity, as well as information about the circumstances of the data collection, for example, temperature, or the location or the conditions in which the sensor is at the time of collecting the data. The data should be collected simultaneously by different platforms, ideally, ideally in different location in a multi sensor system. So some of the data that we may want to collect are images, but also temperature sound recording spectral data emissivity that tells you the color in a very fine grid, as well as other as well as monitoring the motion of objects, which has been very important to identify what we have seen as UAPs have been reported. Much of this certainly can be achieved with professional grade infrastructure, and both new and existing infrastructure to do that, such as astrophysical and geographical observatories, boots on the ground and satellites. Some modern observatories, in particular designed for the detection of time anomalies specifically, as well as for the detection of objects that move rapidly in space, Near Earth Objects, asteroids, meteors, etc. So those could be leveraged for the study of UPS. There is also some effort in ongoing in the developing of facilities that are specifically to detect design to detect UAPs. And many of those comply with the characteristics that I just described. This level of information, though, can also be obtained by the public. We could crowdsource the data collection if a platform to crowdsource exists that supports the collection of data and metadata and the transmission of data and metadata. And we think that NASA might be able to play an important role in the development of this platform. To echo what Dr. bontempi said, NASA has a wealth of experience in coordinating scientific studies, efforts across discipline. Then in domains serving as a bridge between communities in Interdisciplinary Studies, and studies across different countries, all of these can be supported, got of these can be leveraged to support the work of the other agencies in the identification and explain explaining, explaining UAPs. Nas also has a really important experience in data curation, we have heard about the sophistication of the analysis of the data that NASA provides of the sophistication of the calibration, that the data that NASA shares arrives to, we have heard about the open data policy that NASA data goes under. Furthermore, NASA has recently spearheaded an effort review NASA and NASA partner archival data, to prepare them for machine learning and AI. So that data can be served to the community directly am ready to apply AI methods on it. This is an important experience, then could be leveraged in the study of UAPs. However, we do want to emphasize that the current status of the UAP data will make this lift really hard compared to even what is being done by NASA for astrophysical data. And finally, I wanted to emphasize on my colleagues at NASA has a great visibility UAPs ever great power of great public interest. And this could be an opportunity to really increase the reach of science, help people understand the scientific process, and maybe diversify the scientific community by attracting new talent into the scientific community due to the visibility of the problem. And I think that’s all of my remarks.
Walter Scott 1:56:42
questions already. So on the whole crowdsourcing front and getting reports from citizen scientists, what do you think along those lines? Is it providing a set of guidelines for how you report? Is it open sourcing a set of applications for cell phones to be able to pull in a lot the right read metadata? What does that look like?
Federica Bianco 1:57:08
Yeah, so I think guidance wouldn’t just accept our guidance, best practices, etc, would just not be sufficient. I think what needs to be provided is a platform. You mentioned cell phones, cell phones have been used for crowdsourcing the study and detection of a number of things, you know, astrophysics, in space science. So that can definitely be done. The issue I think, is going to be to make sure that this platform is that this plus one reaches a large enough community to really have a crowd to source the problem and coordination, something that this could achieve, for example, is the follow up that I mentioned earlier, right. So we need this conduit community that would use the crowdsourcing facilities to be connected, so that if something is cited by one person, that message can go across and a broader community can point their sensors to the problem to the fighting, and the data has to be transmitted to the end that has to be transmitted to a place that can centralize it and curate it.
Reggie Brothers 1:58:18
Please feel free to sit isn’t bad idea. But have you thought about synthetic data? As you were talking, I was thinking, you know, given the fact we don’t have enough quality data to train a net a neural net, if we’re to generate synthetic data based on the information we do have, and then filling out the other characteristics, as we might guess, does that help us train somebody to iterate in AI to be to find other correlations within data as we get it?
Federica Bianco 1:58:43
So we do it all the time in data science, right? We do generate datasets where the datasets are sparse, or scars, and we cannot train machine learning models. It’s a risky business, because in the data that we generate, we embed the bias that we have. So we are thinking about the data, the way in which we think the data looks and the way in which the thing do the anomalies look. So if particularly in anomaly detection, it is a very difficult thing to do. To try to make sure that you don’t bias your models to what
David Spergel 1:59:14
you know, I want to come back to this topic of anomaly discussion in our general discussion. We’re starting to run a little late. So we’re gonna cut off questions now. But we do have a little time later at the end. So don’t forget, don’t forget your questions, bring them up again in discussion, and we’ll we’ll talk more more later. Great. So David’s, our next speaker
David Grinspoon 1:59:44
All right, good afternoon. My name is David Grinspoon. I’m a planetary scientist and astrobiologist, and I’m going to talk for just a couple of minutes about how observations beyond Earth are relevant to our Study of UAPs. Many of NASA’s missions are at least in part, focused on answering the question of whether life exists beyond Earth. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. As part of this, we consider how to search for bio signatures, observations we can make of other planets, which may might betray the presence of life. So we look for things like anomalous gases in the atmospheres of planets, and other anomalies, which may possibly reveal the presence of life. When we discover such an anomaly, we don’t conclude that we’ve discovered life, we seek more data to understand what we’re seeing. And often this leads to other new discoveries. Similarly, we can talk about looking for techno signatures, observations we can make, which might reveal the presence of technological activity somewhere else. NASA is also supporting some research studying techno signatures. While there is at present, no evidence, we’re aware of suggesting an extra terrestrial source for UAPs. These existing NASA programs are relevant to the question of UAPs in at least two way is it a known or unknown natural phenomena? Must it be technological? Is it known terrestrial technology. So these scientific communities have relevant experience in determining and communicating about whether observations which first appeared to reveal extraordinary evidence actually justify making extraordinary claims. Second, if we do acknowledge an extraterrestrial source, however unlikely as one possibility for UAPs, then these objects must have traveled through the solar system to get here. within the scientific community, there’s a widespread, but by no means universal belief that there are extraterrestrial civilizations, and we have a well developed rationale. There’s a lot of literature for discussing this, which I won’t go into now, in the interest of brevity, but it has to do with the vast numbers of exoplanets and the timescales of evolution and the possibility of convergent evolution on different planets leading to somewhat similar outcomes. It’s a fascinating subject. But the the relevant point here is that the same rationale, which says support supports the idea that extra extraterrestrial civilizations may exist, and may be detectable, also supports the idea that finding extraterrestrial artifacts in our own solar system is at least plausible. NASA is the lead agency for solar system exploration. It already has an active program of detecting objects in our solar neighborhood, using both ground based and space based facilities. And it could leverage those capabilities to search for objects in space with anomalous motion, anomalous trajectories, unusual light curves, anomalous spectral signatures, or other characteristics. Most of the solar system has not been searched for artifacts or anomalies. And these modest data analysis efforts could potentially be applied to existing and planned planetary missions. The Galaxy does not stop at the edge of the solar system, and the solar system does not stop at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s all a continuum of possibilities worthy of investigation. If NASA applies the same rigorous methodology toward UAPs, that it applies to the study of possible life elsewhere, then we stand to learn something new and interesting, whatever the ultimate explanation is, of those phenomena. And that’s all I wanted to say right now.
David Spergel 2:04:04
We have time for one or two comments or questions or thoughts?
Paula Bontempi 2:04:12
Yeah, thank you for that, you know, it struck me while you were speaking about bio signatures that we do a lot of that type of analysis, right, and our home planet in different capacities. And so it’s more of a comment. But I wonder your thoughts on you know, bringing together those communities that might not work together, and whether that would aid in, you know, not only establishing what’s normal, but to, you know, enabling the detection, or maybe the understanding explanation of a UAP if reported?
David Grinspoon 2:04:47
Absolutely. I mean, you know, the focus of my talk was was observations elsewhere, but in fact, most of what the field of astrobiology has to study is here on Earth, because after all, it’s our one example of an inhabited planet and it’s a little bit you easier to get to to make observations? So, yes, any any insights you have in that area or any any suggestions for for collaboration between those communities would be very valuable.
Shelley Wright 2:05:17
So, of course, NASA hasn’t been researching the techno signature field for very long, and there’s been a stigma with techno signatures for many decades. Are there any lessons learned, we can impose from the techno signature in the SETI community, to the UAP, and solar system? Studies?
David Grinspoon 2:05:37
So really good question. I guess the immediate thought it sparks in me is that, yeah, techno signatures, were kind of treated, kept at arm’s length for a long time by NASA because of stigma, and ultimately, can’t be kept away forever. If you’re, if you are an agency curiosity driven, trying to understand the whole universe, you have to move beyond stigmas, and just try to honestly look at whatever evidence there is. And so I think in that broad sense, the same lesson ought to apply to UAPs.
Anamaria Berea 2:06:16
Um, as someone who has been working in astrobiology and data sciences for some time now, it strikes me when both Dr. Bianco and you talked that the differences that seemed to me between bio signatures and techno signatures fields, and UAAP field, again, relies on the data. So bio signatures and techno signatures they have very well standardized datasets they have collected, been collecting datasets for some time, and they are able to apply machine learning artificial intelligence algorithms. While it’s a totally different question with UAPs, in how we can apply artificial intelligence here. So again, just like Dr. Of Yaga, how she said, it’s about data standardization. So I hope that the UAP field will learn how to work with the data from the bio signatures and techno signatures fields.
David Grinspoon 2:07:13
Yeah, that’s a good point, the one, the one point I push back on a little bit is whether techno signatures has been has a lot of data in that sense. The one part of techno signatures, which is looking for signals from radio and optical, and that sort of thing that’s been, you know, associated with SETI for a long time. You’re right, there’s a lot of data there that we’ve been collecting, but the term techno signatures, this sort of newly being adopted in it. In a way, it reminds me the distinction, we heard from the FAA about a cooperative and noncooperative, that with techno signatures we’re looking, there’s more of an emphasis on finding technology that is not necessarily intended to signal us but just sort of doing what technology does, and finding ways to, you know, so it’s not looking for signals as much. And in that domain, we have not necessarily been collecting information for that long but, But your point is well taken that there are lessons learned from certainly the astrobiology and the the sort of classical SETI field where we’ve had a lot of data and we could look at how that is analyzed, and try to collect the data for UAPs that will be amenable to that same sort of analysis.
David Spergel 2:08:23
Thank you. Close next.
Karlin Toner 2:08:35
Hello, everybody. I’m Carolyn toner. I’m an aerospace engineer, you know, really struck me when Dr. Drake opened up this afternoon and talked about this really small needle in a really big haystack that we’re looking for. And I’m going to talk to you about reporting a theme that we’ve heard a lot, how can we make that haystack smaller and that needle bigger? So reporting of UAP events has received a lot of attention recently. But I think that there are still barriers for people to report. How are where should they report? Will someone take action on their report? Well, the reporter be believed, or will they be shamed? We’ve heard over the course of our fact finding that many scientists and aviators consider the study of UAPs to be fringe at best. So this suggests there’s a significant negative stigma associated with reporting or even researching such phenomena. That said, By encouraging military aviators to disclose anomalies that they’ve seen or detected, the Department of Defense is receiving many more reports. I think, in the time that we’ve been looking at this topic, growing from an ODI report that was something like 500 to I think this morning, we heard something like 800 now so that’s accelerating And then DoD will soon also mandate if not already reporting by pilots, which will even grow that set. I would propose to this panel that NASA can help make it safer for researchers to explore data in the civil airspace domain. Simply by starting that work internally. NASA could look at how civil anomaly data is shared. study how to incentivize reporting, assess the possibility of crowdsourcing data, which I think we’ve heard a bit about this afternoon, or sponsor and participate in conferences on UAP detection. Our team has really only seen I’d say a few unclassified images of UAP, which lack the contextual data that’s needed to understand their true nature. And I believe we’ve heard a single firsthand account from a former military aviator. So one of my colleagues, Josh has an example, to show just why it would be important for NASA to also shout helped shape how the data and information is reported. But before I turn the mic over to Josh, I want to make a recommendation to my fellow panelists, that we consider advising NASA to more fully assess the cultural and social barriers to studying and reporting UAP. And for NASA to implement a plan to leverage its brand image to start removing these obstacles that
David Spergel 2:11:41
go up and that will take discussion.
Joshua Semeter 2:11:45
So you can call my slide deck if you want.
Joshua Semeter 2:12:00
So it’s not it’s not the charge of our panel to evaluate UAP evidence. But part of our statement of task is to assess the scientific analysis techniques that are available, you don’t have to start it just yet. And the and how we might use them to determine the physical constraints on UAP. You know, the UAP reports with the most detailed contextual informations are the ones from the Navy aviators, and they’re using a combination of of ranging, and infrared imaging information. And for these cases, we can directly calculate critical parameters of a UAP, such as altitude and velocity under certain assumptions. And it’s, you know, the main point I want to make here is that this multi sensor approach is absolutely critical to charting a path forward for UAP investigations, and that pertains to NASA as well. So I’m going to provide one example here just to illustrate the crucial role of science and scientific analysis and the role of scientific analysis to avoid misinterpretation in some sense. Next build. Hit space. Yeah, okay, so this is this video was recorded by pilots deployed from the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2015. The example has been given the nickname go fast, because it gives an impression of an object moving very rapidly against the ocean surface. And, you know, the question is, is this impression correct? And, you know, if not, what can we say quantitatively about what that object is doing in kind of Earth’s centered coordinate system. Fortunately, the information needed to determine the altitude and velocity of this object is contained on the display. So go ahead and next. And this includes the elevation angle of the camera, the Asmath angle of the camera, the target range and nautical miles, aircraft altitude, the time reference and seconds, indicated airspeed and knots. You know, this information in this video in particular has been discussed quite a bit on the on the web. So let’s begin with the object altitude. Next, please. So knowing the Jets altitude and the bearing to the target, we can apply basic trigonometry to figure out where that object is in altitude space. And it’s turns out to be, you know, provided the range information is accurate, which can have some uncertainties associated with it, but the object appears to be at about 13,000 feet. And important aspect of this here is that it’s sort of midway between the jet and the ocean. So it’s the ocean that looks like it’s right behind it is actually 4.2 miles away. And this is our first indication that some are Most of the motion that we observe the apparent motion of the object is, in fact, due to the rapid motion of the sensing platform, which is about 430 miles per hour in this case. But we don’t have to guess about this. So we have enough information on this display to actually reconstruct the encounter. Go to the next slide, please. And so this is what this is, this is using additional information on the screen, including the time axis. And so we know that this aircraft is backing about 15 degrees left, and you can compute through a simple calculator the radius, approximate radius of curvature of the flight. And you the bottom line is I won’t go into detail here. But if you can get the bearing and range to the target at two locations with known separation in time, you can figure out how far it moved. And in this case, Osijek moved about 390 meters in 22 seconds, and that corresponds to velocity of just 40 miles per hour. And so that’s the velocity is consistent with wind speeds at 13,000 feet. So it’s not our task to conjecture what this object is, but it’s an example that illustrates the type of data needed to determine critical parameters that will help us identify such objects going forward. In addition to the importance of quantitative analysis, this example also serves to illustrate the kinds of cognitive bias we have to contend with, for UAPs recording from unfamiliar perspectives. And Shawn Kirkpatrick showed another example of that this is this is a parallax effect case. Thank you. Any questions?
David Spergel 2:16:45
Thanks. Actually, before we have questions, actually a good moment. China wants to comment on his one of the questions, if we will bring Shawn up and then take questions for everybody, or more discussion.
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 2:17:05
Thanks, that was that was actually very helpful for everyone, I’m sure. Just one piece of clarification on the video that we showed the second one that was the new, newly released one had the three aircraft in it. The question was asked about if it was a stabilized background against which the jitter was showing? I am not 100% certain of that answer, it might just be a bunch of dust on that sensor. But let me go back and get you a more fulsome answer. It is either stabilized background, or it’s just garbage. But in either event, the three aircraft are jittering, because of the platform, but that’s another example of exactly what you’re saying, right? It’s the perception of the of the operator who thinks it’s doing something else when it’s actually just your own camera.
Joshua Semeter 2:17:55
Shot in your event, it seems to me that what you mean by jitter, in this case is the plane is actually making motions that are causing a parallax. So it’s
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick 2:18:03
actually more than that. So the plane will move, and that’ll cause the parallax that you just showed, but the sensor itself, the a lot of these cameras are in gimbals. For those of you not certain what a gimbal is, it’s the thing that your your cameras sit on your telescopes sit on it moves it around and different directions. Those can sometimes be stabilized, in which case they they damp out the motion of the platform. And in other cases they’re not. And they jump around. And so what you’re actually seeing in that video, is what we call jitter of the sensor against the platform. So the platform is moving, and the sensor is moving. It’s not a stabilized against the target. But the once it’s collected, sometimes in processing, the background has stabilized frame to frame just like some of those tick tock videos you see. Right. Same idea.
Warren Randolph 2:19:02
Yeah, just wanted to jump in here, I think, make a couple of comments. Just follow up on what Josh said and my experience of flying, you know, over 15,000 hours 30 something years in airplanes and both in space and the environment that we fly in space or you know, an atmospheric flight, very, very conducive to optical illusions. So I get why these pilots would look at that go fast video and think it was going really really fast. I remember one time I was flying in the warning areas off of Virginia Beach military operating area there. And my REO thought 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 you No, oftentimes in space, I would see things and I was like, Oh, that’s really not behaving like it should it’s not, it doesn’t have the trajectory of a satellite or a planet on the back of the star field. And every single time, when I would look at it long enough, I would realize that it was atmospheric lensing. It was the fact that what I was looking at was actually flying behind the atmosphere. And because of variations in the atmosphere, it made the trajectory look like it wasn’t going in a straight line, it was going like this, and they’d go like that. And it would turn in the other direction, always was always the case. My brother, Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut, and also now a US senator, I was with him for dinner last night, he shared a story with me, again, that he had shared years ago, but I had kind of forgotten about it. And I think it’s worth sharing. And that is when he was the commander of STS 124, I think it was in 2008, they were getting ready to close the payload bay doors of the spaceship. And before they do that, you got to make sure nothing interferes with the doors. Because if the doors don’t close properly, the space shuttle can reenter the atmosphere, it would come apart, it’s part of the structural integrity of the vehicle. So they see something in the payload bay. 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, my brother grabbed the camera, they took a picture of it. And when they blew up the picture, they realized that this is not a bolt or a tool in the payload bay, 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 topple optical illusions, oftentimes, guys fly into the water. And there are cases where, you know, pilots have rendezvous on a buoy, because they thought that was their wingman. It’s just very, very challenging environment to work in, especially at night. And in my experience, the sensors kind of have the same issues as the, you know, the People’s eyeballs.
Mike Gold 2:22:23
So per what Scott just said, I think we need to take it as an action to investigate an identified animated phenomena to go after Bart Simpson. I think what Josh is gotcha is very, very helpful and shows why we need multiple sources of data, where the radar hits, where there are other sightings. Unless we can look at this from a holistic perspective, it’s very difficult to draw conclusions. And relative to stigma, and I appreciate the reports that our colleagues gave. I think there’s plenty of stigma right here in this building. And I’m sure you’ve suffered from it at times. And I just want to commend administrator though, who’s always be Senator Nelson to me for his leadership, and candidly, courage and getting an asset to tackle this issue. And as we look at what Shawn had articulated that what he wants NASA to do, as we look at the recommendations for reporting and how we need to collate that reporting, I’m very concerned that this could be effectively done on an ad hoc basis. And I’ve been a part of far too many panels and studies that end up sitting on the shelf. I don’t want this to be one of those exercises. And we can discuss this further. But I would call for and recommend a permanent office within NASA to support this activity, I’ll be likely a modest one, what’s collate this information, collate that data, to archive the information and act as the open forward facing counterpart to Shawn and Aaro, I think then we could continue and actually accomplish the reporting, the stigma issues that have been raised, and we could do so in a relatively affordable fashion. Because again, I don’t want to all of our work to end up being in vain.
David Spergel 2:24:17
So now, Jen’s gonna turn to our charts. And and, you know, as panel would we were convened with a set of questions that we were charged to address, we’ve been addressing them through the topics we’ve talked about, and through things, as we’ve been thinking this through, but we’re going to organize the next part of the discussion with Jen presenting these things. And this is also a chance to get into some of the discussion phase. Because we can look at each of these questions as the topics that we make, we want to make sure we address as part of the report.
Jen Buss 2:24:58
Thanks, David, and I Want to thank the panelists all for all of your work? All of the knowledge that I’ve gained from from each of you through this time, I took it upon myself in preparing for today’s meeting to draft a statement that answers the eight questions that we were provided at the beginning of the last summer when the panel was created. So I’m going to read the question out loud. I’m going to read my statement. And I’m going to pause, let you think and reflect and if there’s remember, this isn’t all of the details associated with each of these answers, right? This is to be a kind of high level mixture. We’ve got the major points there. And this is an initial take for these answers. So the first question goes, what types of scientific data currently collected and archived by NASA or other civilian government entities should be synthesized and analyzed prior to potentially shed light on the nature and origins of UAP. So the panel reviewed data sources, analytic tools, data architectures from NASA, NOAA, FAA, commerce and others. The data that we recognize were not collected for the purpose of identifying UAP, which leaves bias in the data that was collected. Even though there is an immense amount of data available, it is hard to access and the sensors that were used were not well calibrated for identifying anomalous phenomena.
Jen Buss 2:26:46
No questions moving forward.
Jen Buss 2:26:48
Question number two kind of feel like Jeopardy. What what types of scientific data currently collected and held by nonprofits and companies should be synthesized and analyzed to potentially shed light on the nature and origins of UAP. Many organizations exist to track sightings of anomalous phenomena in the Earth’s atmosphere, both nonprofit for profit, and otherwise, the study panel concluded that much of the inputs collected by these organizations are not considered scientific data in nature, and that they do not contain unbiased information. They’re not repeatable. And they typically come with eyewitness accounts, which we’ve heard even today, that there’s hesitations with using only eyewitness accounts to recognize or identify UAP. To the point about commercial or companies, there are a lot of space companies that some lobbied hard to get into present to us. They have troves of data, but they’re collected for a variety of different purposes, then the purpose of UAP. And those systems while they are well calibrated, are only one source of money that could be used. Questions, comments, concerns? Yes, Carla?
Karlin Toner 2:28:13
I’ll bite on that one. You know, I think your answer is correct as to what we’ve seen. But where I would go is if we made a recommendation to NASA that we’re really asking them to build a roadmap. And we haven’t done a robust cataloging, we looked at sources mentioned sources that we think might be relevant, but perhaps more robust effort, cataloging would be a good modest start.
Jen Buss 2:28:44
It’s good, I will only incite defensive trying to answer the exact question as opposed to the panel rather than trying to add recommendations at this point. But yes, point I’ll take it and thank you.
David Spergel 2:28:57
I mean, I think one of the data sets that we just learned about, you know, heard more about today, and thinking about so calibrating things is the FAA data on anomalous, you know, tracking events, right. And I think this is something where, if we had, you know, some imaging software people, you know, sell citizen scientists with cell phone cameras identify some event that looks interesting. One of the places you’d like to be able to turn is the FAA data. And having, you know, if there is to go back to, you know, having a NASA responsibility for data NASA makes because a lot of experience in serving as a clearinghouse for data from across the government for civilian data, right. It’s something we do in lots of different areas. And I think there are some opportunities with datasets there and I think the radar data is one that comes to mind as well. We don’t want to forget about isn’t available datasets. Yeah,
Jen Buss 2:29:58
absolutely. Question three, I think goes more towards the recommendations of what other types of scientific data should be collected by NASA to enhance the potential for developing an understanding of the nature and origins of UAP. So we’ve heard now from two of the panelists on some of the information that should be collected, or the way that some of that data should be organized in a manner to make it available for people to analyze that information. And the only other thoughts that I had here was, was really recognizing the difference in the sensor thresholds, right. So we can always tune a sensor all the way to the resolution that we might need or we might want. And as we collect that data to recognize for the scientists that are doing those analyses, the bounds of each of the systems that they’re that they’re using.
Paula Bontempi 2:31:00
Yeah. You know, what strikes me on that one? When you were reading, though? The answer, the proposed answer was, what may be new, maybe something that’s new to NASA in the sense of like, a time series so we can know what’s normal. So we can perhaps identify what’s not normal or anomalous, right? So I’m not sure to what extent it’s like the most unsexy thing to sell on the face of the planet, right is making consistent long term observations. But I think that the agency may be set up to do just that, for multiple reasons, right?
Jen Buss 2:31:40
Yeah. persistent
Federica Bianco 2:31:42
data collection, the agency does that in a lot of cases for us to physical purposes. So the infrastructure, of course, you know, pointing up and pointing at a different distance, but the infrastructure for collecting these kinds of data organizing and keeping it and that does exist, yeah.
Jen Buss 2:31:57
And there are, in their defense, a lot of satellite companies that are doing that persistent collection as well. Question for which scientific analysis techniques currently in production could be employed to assess the nature and origins of UAP, which types of analysis techniques should be developed? This is a two part with what exists today and what should be. So we’re looking also at recommendations. Based on the information provided by the presenters to the panel. There are very few credible analysis technique techniques available that currently exist to assess the nature and origins of UAV. The onset of artificial intelligence and automated analysis techniques give promise to being able to do that in the future.
Federica Bianco 2:32:54
I wanted to add something to that perhaps, which is that really to design the analysis, you need to know what the data looks like, right? So, you know, we can’t really say what kind of analysis should be created on the hypothetical data that we’re recommending should be collected in some, you know, somewhat specified fashion,
Jen Buss 2:33:14
if it’s all hypothetical, and we want to collect all of this data. And we know what format it’s going to be. And we can design analysis techniques around it.
Federica Bianco 2:33:21
And at that point, it’s likely that there are analysis techniques that are that already exist of anomaly detection work, we just don’t know which one will be more suitable, because the data as it should be, is doesn’t exist yet. Correct.
Jen Buss 2:33:35
She said exactly what I was gonna say, Yeah. And that’s what I was getting out with my point not that those analysis techniques don’t exist in the scientific community, just that they’re not being applied to this problem set right now. And it’s hard to apply them when we don’t have the known data of what would go into those. David?
David Spergel 2:33:53
Yeah, I think something we want to stress here is the importance of uniform data in the way it’s collected. Because particularly when you’re looking for outliers, if you have data coming from many different observing techniques, right, and just having a uniform set of cameras, a uniform set of detectors, so you understand the characterize them, right, because this is a needle in the haystack problem. And, you know, every camera to me, I’d mentioned in the opening session, ghosting and optics. Now, that’s going to be different in every different detector everyday. Right? And you. Before we get to the analysis techniques, we want to make sure we design the data collection, so that your analysis techniques can effectively be used on it. Right? If it can I
Walter Scott 2:34:41
take a slight issue with that, which is it sounds like you’re implying that you need a single way of collecting the data. I’d argue it’s really you need to understand the various ways in which you’re collecting the data and you’re able to cross calibrate across those different approaches. Because I seriously doubt that there is a single detector,
David Spergel 2:35:05
I think a handful of ways so that Yeah, well characterize things, things need to be well characterized to be useful, I guess, the way I would state it, and it takes time and energy to work out gross things. So that that’s, that’s, I think the challenge.
Anamaria Berea 2:35:22
So following up on both your points, I think it’s where we can actually apply artificial intelligence. So we cannot apply artificial intelligence on the current data. But we can apply artificial intelligence in a way that we can design characteristics for the data that we need, and how we can collect the data that we need. So
Mike Gold 2:35:44
this is probably more of a frustration than anything else. So I don’t know how helpful it will be. But I think we’re not looking for a needle in a haystack. We’re looking for anomaly in a haystack. We don’t even know that we’re looking for a needle, that it’s just a discolored piece of hay. I’m from Montana. So I love good hay analogy. I don’t know what the phenomenology is that we’re looking for. We say anomalous. Again, this question earlier, what does that mean? nominalist acceleration? Like, I think as we try to look at the data, we’re starting from an almost impossible position. When if we don’t know what we’re looking for, is it a radiation signature? Is that something electromagnetic is that something like that is why this is so challenging, and frustrating to me that we’re talking about monitoring something that we don’t even know what we’re supposed to monitor?
Jen Buss 2:36:33
Let me just offer Josh, before you jump in the scientific process of hypothesis driven research of that, while we don’t know all of the possible outcomes and the entire world, we can ask very specific questions, and go about it in a very scientific process to understand. So you’re right, we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for. But we know hotspots, as we’ve seen from both FAA and aero, we do know some of those conditions that we might be looking for. So if you start with with kind of what you know, are places to start to go and look, and you start with the data that we have available to us, we might start being able to untangle the chicken and egg problem, you can what
Mike Gold 2:37:23
is the phenomena that we’re looking for?
Jen Buss 2:37:27
So we’ve heard them from Sean, I would pull up Shawn’s chart, but I can’t quickly do that. of the criteria that he said on the trends, I use word criteria, he said trends of six or seven phenomena, I guess, have specific size or within a specific motion range. And it’s something different than what we’ve seen before, something we don’t recognize. And so when you go to look for something that you don’t recognize it, it can be pretty easy. And that we’ve fooled ourselves today, and even watching some of these videos of what’s going on. But when you’re able to corroborate that with three or four other sources, it starts to make sense. Right? So something that looks like magic to the naked eye or to that camera, and that sensor isn’t once you understand all of the effects of what was going on in the surrounding environment.
Reggie Brothers 2:38:28
Got a question? Can we? Because it’s not gonna say frustration you do. Right? It’s regardless of what you’re looking for. If you don’t know what it is whether using AI or match filtering techniques, you can’t find it. Right, you can’t find it. So because the question I have is, can we use social media, that kind of thing as a way of cueing to know where something’s happening? Because we know Google searches can lead you to better understand where outbreaks happen, right? disease outbreaks, can use similar type of conflation of data to start saying, well, something’s going on here. Let’s start queuing sensors in that area that requires some real time capability. But is that something we can think about?
Federica Bianco 2:39:04
Can you object to that just a bit, you can find things that you don’t know how they look. Okay. There is a lot of the algorithms in anomaly detection are really based on let’s know, let’s find out how what we know looks like so that anything that doesn’t look like that can be identified and spotted. And then we can think whether or not we understand it, right. And so I think the point about the homogeneous detectors, really is about that we need to have a solid understanding of the normals that the anomalies with the outliers, as we sometimes perhaps more often call them in in science, right? Yeah,
Jen Buss 2:39:41
absolutely. I do want to be cautious of time. We were supposed to end this about 10 minutes ago.
David Spergel 2:39:48
Right. So this has drifted into discussion, but I think we’re doing discussion. So do you have any last topic you want to hit? If not, then we’ll just open up the general
Jen Buss 2:39:55
I have four more questions that we’re technically supposed to answer. All right.
David Spergel 2:40:00
Let’s do one. We can do four
Jen Buss 2:40:04
questions in two minutes. Right? Okay, why don’t you be drowned? In considering all of the factors above what basic physical constraints can be placed on the nature and origins of UAP? Mike, would you like to take this question? Got it? I, in my my notes to answer this knew that Shawn had presented some trends. So I used that kind of as the basis for what basic physical constraints could be available, and also the Josh’s presentation that he just presented of we know some of these are still in the realm of understanding. We just haven’t applied basic physics to understand what’s there. What we have. Question six, what civilian airspace data related to UAPs have been collected by government agencies, and are available for analysis to a inform efforts to better understand the nature and origins of UAPs and B determine the risk of UAPs to the national airspace. So we saw some of this in I’m going to use examples from today to kind of move quickly. Some of this in Mike Frese presentation, talking about the air risks, right that FAA is is always looking out for we know, by altitude and by sensor and curvature of the earth and line of sight. And as you get higher that you can see more, right, so we have a lot of civilian airspace data that can start to understand the nature and origins of the UAP. And determining the risk is based on how much you know, right? So you think about, I go straight to space, and I think about satellites and one tiny piece of space debris, you can destroy an entire satellite, because they’re moving really, really fast and in the vacuum of space. It’s not necessarily so true in airspace, right? But something that we don’t know could have a severe impact on pilots and their flight plan and all of that, which then could really wreak havoc on all of the United States airspace. And so being able to understand and identify what those are phenomena are, will help de risk the air flight safety in the national airspace. Question seven, what current reporting protocols and air traffic management data acquisition systems can be modified to acquire additional data on past and future UAPs? We’ve heard a lot of the reporting structures it was talked about earlier today. Those probably can be adapted and improved and it’s up to us and discussion as the panel on what those recommendations might be. Question eight and I’m get off stage what potential enhancements to the future air traffic management development efforts can be recommended to acquire data concerning future reported UAPs to assist in the effort to better understand the nature and origins of the UAPs. The potential enhancements, automatic filtering of the knowns has come up as a talking point. These are specific really to acquiring data, the tuning of those sensor platforms, the multimodal spectrum collection, and being able to kind of timestamp or geo stamp each of those to corroborate the sightings. So I will leave the panel with that with time to continue discussion.
David Spergel 2:43:55
Thank you. Great to be here
David Spergel 2:44:12
but before I open it up, I just wanted to restate Federica his answer to Mike for hay. If you know the properties of hay very well, and you can cat you go through your haystack and say I don’t know what this is. But it doesn’t look like hey, you don’t need to have a match filter looking for a needle in a haystack. If you know hey very well. Speak to Middle America now as a New York City resident my impression as we go through Hey, with your you don’t want to do it with your hands. But I defer to you on a choice today. I know Yeah, I think yeah. So I want to, in the final minutes we have here before the public session, look to the future. I think a lot of us have looked at the data we have now with a sense of dissatisfaction. And say, what data would you want? And how would you want to collect it? And just think about, you know, we don’t need to design the detectors. But think about the characterization, that we we’d like, what wavelengths we’d like. And, you know, just to kind of throw that out as one way to think about what we might want to recommend.
Paula Bontempi 2:45:46
So, one thing that strikes me in that question is that I’m not totally certain that we’ve dedicated our time and effort to looking for anomalies. I think, by default, there are some science communities that look for things like the genesis of a hurricane or a harmful algal bloom in the ocean or, you know, something in interstellar space. But I’m not sure we ever focused our interdisciplinary effort on that. And I think the question you ask is a really interesting one part of our statement of task, right, but I’m not sure I can answer that quite yet. That’s how I feel about that one.
David Spergel 2:46:26
Sure.
Shelley Wright 2:46:29
Surely, right. I’m going along with Dr. Bones happy point there. We heard a lot from AARO about specifics about the needle, one to four meters in size zero to Mach two, you can then look at NASA’s assets, right? And look at its spatial resolution, its spectral resolution, in particular, the frame rate to get I’m gonna get to your question here, Dr. Spergel. You can look at the current NASA assets and try to say which ones could find that needle, the ones that Dr. Kirkpatrick put forward? That analysis has not been done. So one of my recommendations would be for NASA to convene a group and a task force to look at its current assets to calculate what current available data current data, and current facilities could answer. Insight into that. Now to get to your future question. Looking at this, I see Walter is framerate, I see a really big issue with framerate. So if you want to catch fast moving objects, you need to take quick images. If you want to get to these very small sizes and resolution depending on altitude, where your actual you’re taking your image from ground or space, NASA will likely have to increase its framerate into its detectors.
Walter Scott 2:47:51
The short answer to what NASA’s current assets would be able to see would be really big haystacks that are moving very slowly, which I think is the point that you’re making. But that doesn’t mean that that data is not useful. Because if it’s able to characterize the background extremely well, that gives you a better idea of what unusual looks like basically, anything that you do that characterizes the background will contribute to an understanding.
David Spergel 2:48:21
So we’re gonna have to cut this off now because we’re now going to our our public session, public comment session. So turn that over.
Karen Fox 2:48:35
Hello, everybody. I am Karen Fox with NASA’s Office of Communications. And we are segwaying into the public q&a portion of this meeting. As a reminder, this is a faculty meeting that has a Federal Advisory Committee Act. And so we are under a guidance which says that these meetings are public, and that we take public questions. We got hundreds and hundreds of questions. And I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you to everybody who, who submitted them. We’re obviously not going to get to all of them today. But we are going to make attempts to answer some of them online, you can always check back to science.nasa.gov/uap. We’re over time, we will make it clear where we’re putting up some more of those answers. In the meantime, we did have to make some decisions. We stuck to questions that applied to this independent study and UAPs there were a lot of questions about astrobiology and other subjects that we’re not going to get to today. And also in an attempt to get to as many of the questions as possible since so many of them were similar. We’ve we’ve sort of bucketed them. And that is how we’re going to try to address as many as possible. So I’m going to toss the questions to you. And we’ll and we’ll look to getting some answers for our public questions. All right. So first set of questions are specifically about the data being used So, examples, what exactly are you incorporating into your report? What data are we using? What are some examples of data being used? Do we have multisensor data or have objects performing maneuvers that seem truly anomalous? Do we have photos videos? What about having the NASA historian go through the NASA’s historical records? Did you interview military or pilots for this study?
Karen Fox 2:50:24
So looking for some information about the kinds of data I can toss to anyone David looks like he’s dumping it?
David Spergel 2:50:32
Well, I think first and foremost, our goal here was really to create a roadmap. Right? So really, you know, we have been informed by some of the events that are reported and we’ve had. But we’ve certainly not done a complete historical study are in an archive. And I think one of the things we’ve wanted to do was, learn what kinds of events have been recorded, learn about some of the ones that didn’t resolve some of the ones that are unresolved, so we can best think about how in the future, we can collect data so that we can get more robust answers. So that I hope that it did address that question. It does. Others have anything else you’d like to add?
Karen Fox 2:51:19
All right. Well, I will keep going. Another big question category was about transparency, and about sharing information. And so examples in this category are, what is NASA hiding? And where are you hiding it? How much has been shared publicly? Has NASA ever cut the live NASA TV feed away from something? Has NASA released all UAP evidence it has ever received? What about NASA astronauts? Do they have an NDA or clearance that does not allow them to speak about UAP sightings? What are the science overlords hiding? Down events.
Dan Evans 2:52:02
All right, I’ll take a stab at that one, I really want to assure the public. And to double down on the remarks I made this morning that this agency is absolutely cast iron committed to openness and transparency, and honesty. And that commitment also extends to I live NASA TV feeds. They provide real time footage from our various missions. Now, to my knowledge, NASA has never intentionally cut a live feed to hide anything. And that includes you APS, of course, sometimes there are interruptions to our feeds. But that is simply because space is a complex place. There’s a vast array of natural phenomena, human made objects, and so forth. But again, I wanted to reassure the public that we’re absolutely committed to providing the public transparency and openness. Those are the hallmarks of NASA. That’s why we’re here today in public on TV, because we want the public to have the opportunity to see the process of this committee doing its work in public. It’s only right.
Warren Randolph 2:53:13
Just to follow up on what I what I said, I didn’t mean to be to joke about it. But in my 20 years at NASA, no one, either officially or unofficially, in my recollection, have ever discussed or briefed us or had any kind of discussions about anything that would be considered UAP, or UFO or anything like that.
2:53:37
And I’ll ask you to stand for one second and state your name. I’ll ask you to stand for one second and state your name just so everybody know who was speaking,
Warren Randolph 2:53:44
it’s hard to just following up on, on the question about if NASA astronauts ever signed an NDA, or anything of that, any thing like that, in my experience of being in the Astronaut Office for 20 years, there was never any formal or informal discussions at all about UAPs or UFOs, or anyone reporting anything that would suggest something from, you know, beyond our planet. Thank you very much. Yes, please,
David Grinspoon 2:54:21
just want to make a quick comment about the culture of science in relation to this question. Scientists by nature are at least intellectually sort of rebellious. It’s, it’s, it’s in our nature to question authority. You know, that’s how you’re a good scientist. You don’t just take someone’s word for it, you try to discover the truth. And for that reason, you know, this question about what are the science overlords hiding that’s sort of written in a facetious way, but I just want to emphasize that there’s no way that that all scientists could be in on, on on trying to hide something because it’s just not in our nature. Somebody told me to try to hide something as a scientist that would just increase my desire to, to, to Belay that order, and to release it. And I think that’s true of our community in general.
2:55:13
Alright, thank you so much. I’m gonna go on to our third set of questions. Which is, has NASA been tracking Earth’s atmosphere? Or are we also studying bodies of water for for UAP? I think that’s a damn question for NASA or? Yeah.
Paula Bontempi 2:55:32
Here’s the oceanographer.
Nadia Drake 2:55:35
So,
Paula Bontempi 2:55:36
you know, my understanding is this is a completely independent study to assess, you know, what assets, what data, what science, what observations, platforms, NASA has to potentially help evaluate and understand UAP, right. We have? Well, NASA has an Earth Science Division, and many scientists that many centers and many academics and other partners out there that study the Earth as a system. We do this from the unique vantage point of space, and the atmosphere is part of that. So I think Dr. Kirkpatrick stated this morning, that to his knowledge, and I think two hours there, there isn’t anything that’s been reported below the ocean surface. You know, and so I think part of what we’ve been talking about all day is, you know, what assets are out there to actually begin to identify data that could be useful in explaining any of these reports? If and should they come in? So I think that’s probably it, unless there’s something else to add.
2:56:53
All right, then thank you. Moving on to our fourth general bucket of questions. What are you doing to solve the stigmatization surrounding the study of UAP? Take that one. And state your name, if you wouldn’t mind. First.
Karlin Toner 2:57:12
One toner, FAA. I think the fact that NASA has called us together here as a panel to look into this, that NASA is hosting a public meeting that we’ve heard, right, it clearly stated, We’re here to be transparent. I think that’s the first step in trying to really normalize the study of UAPs. And I, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about the reporting about how to make it credible. And we talked also about UAP. In one of the earlier talks this morning, of the definition of the A whether it was aerial or anomalous, as the legislation now is, and really the distinction beyond UFOs. Right when we’re looking at UAPs. Here, we’re beyond just airplanes, we’re looking at all types of anomalous phenomena. And so that’s just a more inclusive term there.
Mike Gold 2:58:12
Still, Michael, just wanted to emphasize what Carlin said, which is so accurate, I really consider it quite amazing that we’re here having this discussion as the leadership service, great kudos for this. And beyond, I think a recommendation that I’d like to make is that NASA participate in symposia in panels sponsor research, when you have the NASA logo on that sponsored research on the discussion. It really helps normalize and push back against the stigma. I think NASA can leverage its excellent reputation, both domestically and abroad. To help push back on that stigma. I think it’s important to do so not just for science and discovery, but for national security, that we’ve all seen what’s occurred with balloons from rival nations. We don’t want this stigma to be a vulnerability that rival nations can take advantage of. Yes, Dan.
Dan Evans 2:59:03
Thanks, Karen, just a few additional points. From the agency perspective, we are of course, taking a set of actions to effectively normalize the study of UAP. So that involves collaborating across the government, encouraging an open dialogue and promoting rigorous scientific inquiry. Let me turn to each of those in turn. So in terms of promoting a rigorous scientific inquiry, the primary way we’re doing this is by being truly rigorous, and employing an evidence based methodology in everything that we do. That is characteristic of scientific research. It’s no accident that the people up on this stage are true experts in their reflect his respective fields. Okay. So that is, in turn going to help us to legitimize UAP studies, encouraging open dialogue, so by holding public meetings, so Just this one and having open conversations about findings, then we’re helping to normalize discussions again. And that that really goes arm in arm with our commitment to openness and transparency with the public. And then finally, in terms of collaborating across the government, we’re working very closely with other government agencies, not least Sean’s office AARO to broaden the scope, and the depth of our study. And I honestly believe that this collective interagency approach will lend credibility to the study of UAPs. And it’s going to demonstrate the seriousness with which we’re approaching this issue. Thanks.
Karen Fox 3:00:38
Well, that segues very nicely into what our next set of questions are, which is who we are working with. So the question is, who else is NASA currently working with? Or do we want to work with to study UAP? And is NASA working with international partners?
Jen Buss 3:01:02
I’ll take a stab at it as the questions tasked to this panel, so kindly asked us both in what other government agencies are collecting data, what data is available, NASA is partnering with them in many ways, as well as national, NASA has a wide commercial outreach, and partnerships with understanding what data is available, as well as Nash’s NASS is founded on not founded. But the core principles of NASA are with international partners. So the information that our partners are gathering is typically available to NASA as well. Yes, on all accounts,
Mike Gold 3:01:49
and I may just emphasize an ad that NASA is singular, I believe among government agencies, and its international outreach, again, not to keep talking about the Artemis chords. But you see, countries like Saudi Arabia, that we may not have a great relationship with as government right now. We have Saudi Arabia and Israel in the courts family so that NASA is unique in its scope and ability to reach out. I also think that we’re entering a new era of commercial space transportation, that is going from low Earth orbit out to cislunar space. And that is going to be the purview of the Department of Commerce, which is taking over space traffic management. So I think it’s very important that NASA work with and support commerce as we go through that transition department defense is currently responsible for that. And I think that will help us not only to identify potential UAPs, but to assist in preventing contention, congestion, and eventually conflict. And I also want to note in terms of space debris, debris in orbit right now, I believe represents an existential threat to our very society that we are getting very close to an event that could cause real problems for our ability to access satellites. And that’s what I think there’s great ancillary benefits to the conversation we’re having today that it was we increased our capability to monitor orbit for UAPs. That data could also be very relevant as we look at near Earth objects, and other threats. And again, it’s just end on your objects Apophis, for example. And asteroid is going to come so close to Earth, it will be below geosynchronous satellites. So any effort to begin to catalog and do better in terms of understanding that environment is going to be terrific. And I hope NASA works with commerce and international agencies, on Apophis and other missions.
Karen Fox 3:03:29
I think Federico had something to say to you, I
Federica Bianco 3:03:31
just wanted to add, you know, a lot of the things that we think we might recommend in terms of platforms to collect data that will be useful to study UAVs. You know, we recommend a multi platform and multi site that would also mean likely ground base as well as space based facilities. And this has been done already in astrophysics codes serving the sky, from the ground and from space with different methodologies in different different instruments to get a more comprehensive picture of what’s normal. And then that was an ominous, and about every 10 years, the scientific the astrophysics community in ways but many other branches, convened a panel of experts to see what things can be done to advance the field in the next decade. It’s called the decadal survey for us. And one of the recommendations this year was explicitly for agencies that do astrophysics to work together. So NSF, DOD and NASA to work together, share data share facilities and instruments. So I think this is, you know, there’s a lot of fields will benefit from this including the UAP studies. Absolutely,
Karlin Toner 3:04:44
everyone, toner, I’d like to put an exclamation point on how well NASA is collaborating across the government, I can from the FAA, and I can personally attest that FAA and NASA have a robust engagement in transferring research into practice in the ATM system. I think on the commercial space side, we work well with NASA. And all of our agencies are in the whole of government approach supporting AARO specifically on UAP topic. And and you know, it really comes down to good government and how we deliver because we can each work our own mission space, but to cover the whole space we need to collaborate together.
Dan Evans 3:05:27
And Dan, to put an exclamation point on Carlin’s exclamation point. So I think it’s important to say that, you know, we really do have a good relationship with the automated anomaly resolution office AARO, Sean’s office, and its previous predecessor organization, the UAP Task Force. And we have really benefited from very fruitful collaborations among those various entities. And quite frankly, as, as a taxpayer, one should expect nothing less than the government to be working effectively across different units together, it’s only right. That being said, it’s also important to acknowledge what NASA’s perspective is, in this study, and to acknowledge that the the Department of Defense Intelligence community have massively different equities about the study of UAP. And they have different interests. Ours is a purely scientific one. So you know, we collaborate, we consult, it’s a very good relationship. And I agree wholeheartedly with Carlin, but a whole of government approach is absolutely the right one to take.
Karen Fox 3:06:36
Great, thank you. I will move on to our sixth bucket of questions, which we had many on this topic. Is there evidence that UAP were created from non human intelligence? Yes, please.
Anamaria Berea 3:06:53
I will take this one. First and foremost, we are scientists, and we follow the scientific process. And I hope that the gathering here today showed a little bit of a glimpse on how the scientific process works. It’s not a question that you can answer very quickly with yes or no. And we follow the data, right? So as scientists, we follow the data, we formulate hypotheses, we test theories, we follow the scientific process, the role of this panel has been to create a roadmap and a framework for how all scientists that are interested in this phenomenon, can further study can further collect data can further formulate experiments, getting hypotheses can test different methods, maybe even innovate on the methodology side of things come up with new methods for how we can do basically science, but not just any kind of science, but the science of discovery and exploration, which is basically in the spirit of NASA. So just like Carl Sagan was saying Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We cannot make that kind of extraordinary claims at all, for any kind of big subjects in science, whether it’s UAPs, whether it’s bio signatures, whether it’s techno signatures, this question of whether we are alone in the universe is probably one of the largest questions that we’ve had in our history of science in our history of humanity. And it’s not one that we can take lightly. And that’s why we need so many scientists and multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams to work together and many organizations. So it’s a process. It’s a roadmap, and we work collectively on this. And we hope that within our lifetime, we will be able to answer this big question of whether we are alone or not. And also to better characterize this phenomenon, which is UAPs.
David Spergel 3:09:07
I want to sort of supplement that excellent answer by noting that we have not seen the extraordinary evidence, right. I mean, there’s a sense to give, you know, to make the claim that we see something that is evidence of, you know, non human intelligence, it would be it would require extraordinary evidence. And we have not seen that. I think that’s important to make clear.
Karen Fox 3:09:35
Alright, then I will move on to our seventh set of questions. We received many questions about the budget that is being dedicated to this. How large of a budget will NASA allocate how large of a budget is NASA allocating and how large of a budget will NASA allocate towards this the study of UAPs Dan?
Dan Evans 3:09:56
Yeah, that’s a dumb question. So there are two separate questions. In that, which is what is the budget for this group, this team? And what is the budget going forward? I think now, the budget for this independent study team is very consistent with any other of our external review groups that we bring in to the Science Mission Directorate on an annual basis. So you know, we have maybe 100 200 such groups entirely consistent with that. Also important to say, going forward now that NASA has not established a program relative to UAP. And as a result, there’s no associated programmatic funding. But this is how NASA works. Federal budgeting is a complex journey, of course. And the way NASA particularly NASA Science likes to work is we anticipate and wait recommendations from independent groups such as this one. And we need to wait on final recommendations, and then we’ll make an assessment. So too early to say. But of course, that’s all couched in the fact that federal budgeting is a very complex process, and we will always follow the Lord.
Karen Fox 3:11:03
Alright, we’re making good time. And we have one more question that that encompassed. Many of the ones we got, which is has NASA encountered any aliens or extraterrestrial life? What happens if the public comes across extraterrestrial life? What would NASA do if extraterrestrial life was discovered what the NASA study or do if extraterrestrial life was discovered? Now? I think it’s worth making the distinction that there when we talk about extraterrestrial life, we do have a study within NASA of astrobiology, which is not intelligent life, necessarily. And so I invite you, as you answer this question, to make clear the distinctions as you were talking, in terms of UAPs, as well as any astrobiology work that we do.
David Spergel 3:11:53
I would start by saying one of NASA’s big question is, Is there life out there? Right, and a lot of what NASA is doing, in its exploration of the solar system and beyond, is focused on searching for life in any form. Extraterrestrial, I think one of the things we have learned in the past 20 years is planets are common. We knew, of course, about the planets in our solar system. But we now know there are lots of planets out there. So there are a lot of potential environments for life. And I think one of the most fascinating questions is, do any of those planets host life. And that’s something that NASA is trying to address in a host of different ways. Whether it’s probes that are landing on planets, or designing missions that will look for signatures of life around other planets. So the search for life is a really important thing. We haven’t found life beyond Earth. Yeah. Right. I mean, let’s be clear about this. We haven’t found it yet. But we’re looking, and we’re looking for it and lots of different ways. And, you know, David was discussing techno signatures is one way that we can work both within our solar system and beyond. And there’s so there’s a lot, a lot of different elements, I think, of this potential search. And, you know, just to go back to something so that those phrase an earlier question, you know, is NASA hiding anything about this? No, this is actually what you know, answering this question is one of the things that NASA has and agencies is excited about. It’s what’s something that lots of scientists working with NASA are excited about is, is this question of? Is there life out there? You know, and I think one of the things that makes this question of Are we alone? Such a central question, not just to the scientific community, it’s a central question, I think, for the public. I suspect there are more people watching this than the typical episode of NASA. TV. Right. And this is something where we will have meet, you know, media coming to the press conference, because these questions touch on something that I think is really a deep question for humanity. is, are we alone in the universe?
David Grinspoon 3:14:37
Yeah, it just kind of echo what David said a bit. I mean, obviously, this is something we think a lot about in astrobiology, what, you know, what if we succeed, and, you know, we are very driven to try to find real evidence of extraterrestrial life, and we would be highly driven to share that If we found it, because everyone wants to show that they’ve been able to succeed in what they’re trying to do, and, you know, one, perhaps illustrative example is to think about what happened when we came close when NASA thought maybe they had discovered extraterrestrial life. And, and a big event, actually, in the history of astrobiology was in in the 1990s, when some scientists had thought that they had discovered fossils in a meteorite that came from Mars. And what happens is, you don’t announce it immediately, you make sure that you try to make sure you’re right, because you also don’t want to have false alarms and announce something where and then you go, oops, sorry, we were wrong. That was mistaken analysis. But what happened was when the when the scientists were sure they were right, then there was a big, in fact, presidential press conference with President Clinton and NASA. And it was a big public announcement. And that’s what would happen. If we discovered something we would try to make sure we were right. And then we would very proudly and loudly let the public know about it.
Karen Fox 3:16:06
Thanks. We’ve just one minute left. So I’ll let you finish up.
Paula Bontempi 3:16:09
Yeah, thank you. The only thing I wanted to add, I wouldn’t at all liken it to alien or extraterrestrial life. But in astrobiology and exobiology, you know, there is the exploration of our planet as an analogue for what might be found on other worlds. You know, and what, what is extreme cold was extreme heat, a volcano of black smoke are at the bottom of the ocean, what lives there and how is that even possible and things we still discover, throughout our ocean might look alien to a lot of people, right. And we keep discovering new species of different things, whether they be microbes or algae, or you know, charismatic megafauna, whatever they are. But there are synergies. I know there was an initiative years ago at NASA called oceans across the solar system. And the idea was, could our own Earth ocean be used in the life within it as an analog for what might be discovered elsewhere? So I think that’s an example of a potential synergy of interdisciplinary science, research observations, etc. collection of data and information gathering that could be useful in the future.
Karen Fox 3:17:21
Thank you so much, I will hand it back to David Spergel, your chair.
David Spergel 3:17:33
So let me also just answer the one other piece of that question was, what do you do if you see something surprising, right, where do you report and this is something we’re just to come back to something I mentioned, my opening remarks, the ARL is the our lead agency for UAPs. And while we’ve talked about orange, you know, life in this context, most UAPs, I think, and when one looks at the data, more detail, are going to turn out to be phenomenon we understand, we saw this with some of the balloons or our commercial jets, we saw those examples. Some UAPs. And we saw this with the Chinese balloon that flew over is something an issue sometimes of national security. So we actually do want to encourage people, just from that angle, to report it. So, you know, since just before it will transition to summary, but to answer that question, that, you know, to keep in mind that, you know, the AR O’s role is to be the prime source for understanding those things. And what our charges is to think about what’s NASA’s role, and I think NASA, and this is something, you know, will come, I want to now go back to discussion, we didn’t have that much time for it. To come back to, you know, what we eat what we see as NASA’s role in this. I think one real piece we’ve talked about is big. NASA can help remove the stigma, NASA can draw them more of the scientific community in. And I think what NASA can help do is provide standards of high data quality. I think one of the things that many of us who’ve come you know, not looked at this before I certainly put myself in this group was struck by the limited nature of the data that many events had insufficient data. And that in order to get a better understanding, we will need to have high quality data data will you understand its provenance data from multiple sensors and I think one of the things that, you know, even from the same sensor, as we saw, in Josh’s analysis, also even Sean’s showed us when you can observe event over time, and get velocity information, that gives you a lot of additional information. So we’re gonna want things with high frame rate. We’re gonna want things from Oct perspectives. And so I think those are all going to be pieces of things that we want to think about. I think this is an opportunity for citizen science. I think if we can come up with recommendations in our roadmap that point to ways in which we can collect it, people can collect data, I remain a big fan of these things, they do take over our lives too much, but they are fabulous data collectors have. And I don’t know, there’s something like three, 4 billion or them that are on the planet. And NASA, I think, has the prestige and visibility to develop an app or work with companies to develop apps that could collect data in a uniform and centralized way that I think will, you know, most of the stuff that’s collected, is going to turn out to be commercial planes, balloons, when you have multiple cameras, you can eliminate some of the optical limitations of the ghosting and those effects. Some of them will almost certainly be novel physical phenomenon. Alright, I think it is. We have learned a lot about our planet and how the universe works. There’s a lot we don’t know, I think yeah, you know, as a scientist, what is the most exciting thing is the surprises. And I think that there are things that continue to surprise us about our own planet, there’s phenomenon or atmosphere, the atmosphere that we probably haven’t seen yet, or perhaps we’ve seen and not noticed yet. Right. And there’s, I think, a long history in science, when you look back, and you realize that this discovery had a pre discovery that people had seen something before. And we’re missing it. And those pre discoveries were not of note, because often because we had biases against seeing it, but it wasn’t because there was limitations in data quality. And, you know, one of the things I was taught is, when you have a question you don’t know how to answer, you start by getting better data. And, you know, I will come in, you know, I got to do the summary. And as the Chair, I get to, you know, summarize a conclusion. We need better data would be my my take away, and we need more uniform data. And since I’m so proud of my haystack, we need to be able to understand what’s in the haystack. And it’s a lot more complicated than a haystack, in a sense, right. As you know, it’s got commercial planes, it’s got, you know, drones. And, you know, I think the number of drones out there is large and growing, and will be a continuous source of confusion. We were charged to think about air safety, you know, understanding and characterize and seeing what’s going on with drones is also I think, going to be an important air safety issue. So we’ll need to, you know, to understand the unknown, or start to study the unknown. Another important piece is always going to be characterizing the known really well. And, you know, this is the part I think of a lot of science that seems dry and boring. But it’s calibration and understanding the events you expect to see. You know, in thinking about this area, one of the groups of people that people talk to her particle physicists doing experiments at CERN, where they go through the effort of finding extremely rare events, define new particles. And in order to do that, you need to understand the standard predictions well, so I think another part of the whole stuff worry. And I know this is something a row is working hard on in the context of military is like, you’ve got to characterize what the known things are. You know, when you’ve got that F 35, flying past a balloon, what does it see? What does it see at sunset? What does it see at all observing angles, and that characterizing the normal is an essential thing to do to understand what’s out there. So let me conclude the session by thanking the panelists. It’s been a pleasure learning from you, thanking Shawn and other invited speakers that we’ve had we’ve had for some of our data collection sessions, we’ve learned a tremendous amount from you. And also thank the public for their engagement. I think we were all impressed by the the number and level and sophistication of the questions people sent in. We try to address as many as that we could in the session, as you heard NASA, through science.nasa.gov will provide there’ll be some additional answers provided encourage you to go there. Actually, as a non NASA employee, I’ll put in a little ad for science.nasa.gov. NASA does amazing things. And we’re learning amazing things about the universe and our planet. And just encourage you to go there and continue to learn and continue to explore. So thank you.
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