On Wednesday, members of the NASA advisory board tasked with studying unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) held its first public meeting, debuting its plan for how it would proceed with a report it is scheduled to write this year. Among many topics discussed, several of its members (and NASA officials) stressed that they were not specifically undertaking a hunt for aliens.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to emphasize this loud and proud that there is absolutely no convincing evidence for extraterrestrial life associated with UAPs,\u201d said Dan Evans, the assistant deputy associate administrator of NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate. Evans is responsible for orchestrating the study on UAP.<\/p>\n
During the four-hour meeting, which was livestreamed on the web, the team said that insufficient data and stigma about the topic remain significant barriers to uncovering the nature of UAPs. Panel chairman David Spergel remarked that the team\u2019s role was \u201cnot to resolve the nature of these events\u201d but to create a road map for NASA that could potentially guide future inquiries into the topic.<\/p>\n