The phenomena goes as far back as the 1940’s in the US, where people sighted flying saucers in the sky, linking them to aliens, inspiring numerous blockbuster films.

More data is needed in order to detect the presence of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), widely known as UFO’s, in outer space, NASA said on Wednesday in its first public panel examining the unclassified sightings of the flying objects.

“If I were to summarise in one line what I feel we’ve learned, it’s we need high quality data,” David Spergel, the panel’s chair, said, as quoted by Reuters.

In June last year, NASA formed a 16-member group of experts to dig into the phenomena of UFO’s, which it refers to as UAP’s. The panel is the first to be held and does not come under the Pentagon-based investigation.

Spergel’s remarks came during the committee’s first public meeting on the matter, held in Washington, ahead of the release of a report on its findings. According to Reuters, the report will be released by late July.

“The current data collection efforts about UAPs are unsystematic and fragmented across various agencies, often using instruments uncalibrated for scientific data collection,” Spergel said.

Senior research official at the United States’ agency, Dan Evans, noted that the group has “several months of work ahead of them.”

“I want to emphasise this loud and proud: there is absolutely no convincing evidence for extraterrestrial life associated with” unidentified objects, Evans said.

The phenomena goes as far back as the 1940’s in the US, where people sighted flying saucers in the sky, linking them to aliens, inspiring numerous blockbuster films. This further sparked decades of debates on whether the objects do exist and whether there is a presence of aliens in outer space.

However, NASA said that year that “there is no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin.”

In 2021, a Pentagon report revealed that one out of 144 sightings by the US military pilots made since 2004 cannot be explained, without dismissing the chance that it could be extraterrestrial.

In 1948, the US Air Force launched an investigation into reports over the unidentified flying objects under the title Project Sign. 

In 1966, a committee was established at the request of the US Air Force to look into previous findings of such objects before then creating a study of 59 UFO sightings, titled Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, also widely known as the Condon Report.

However, it was inconclusive and no further investigation was carried out.

In July last year, the US Defence Department established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office with the aim of identifying so-called “unidentified anomalous phenomena” among others that it said “might pose a threat to national security and the operations of the military and federal agencies.”

“I want to underscore today that 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 demonstrate mundane characteristics of balloons, unmanned aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena or other readily explainable sources,” Sean M. Kirkpatrick, director of AARO, said in April.