Claire Reid
NASA have said many UFO sightings may never be fully explained - including one metallic orb spotted above the Middle East in 2022.
The US space agency pulled together a special team of experts from numerous fields, including physics and astrobiology, to look into unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), with a report due in weeks. You can see footage of the spherical UFO here:
Much like the more broadly used term UFOs, UAPs are defined as observations ‘that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena’.
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The team said there's around 50 to 100 sightings made each month, but that just two to three percent are 'possibly anomalous'.
The NASA team’s chair David Spergel spoke during a conference yesterday where he said ‘many of these events are commercial aircraft, civilian and military drones, weather and research balloons, (or) ionospheric phenomenon’ but went on to say that current data was ‘insufficient to provide conclusive evidence about the nature and origin’ to all UAPs.
And even as data gathering improves, he stressed that ‘there’s no guarantee that all sightings will be explained’. Cue the X-Files theme tune.
Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office set up by the US Defence Department, said that much of the UAPs reported centred on spheres, or orbs, that were white, silver or metallic-coloured and capable of travelling at up to 1,522mph otherwise known as Mach 2.
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Sharing the footage above, Kirkpatrick said that the orb spotted above the Middle East was real but that it was ‘no threat to airborne safety’ - so that’s a relief.
Kirkpatrick said: "This is a typical example of a thing we see most of. We see these all over the world and we see these making very interesting apparent manoeuvres.
"This one in particular, however, I may point out, demonstrated no enigmatic technical capabilities and was no threat to airborne safety."
But he was unable to explain exactly what it was we’re looking at in the clip and that more data is needed before specific conclusions can be drawn.
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“We are still looking at it, but I don’t have any more data other than that, so being able to come to some conclusion is going to take some time until we can get better data on similar objects,” he said.
Spergel added: "If I were to summarise in one line what I feel we've learned, it's we need high quality data."