NBC News: "Government UFO Report Timed for Halloween Seems to Downplay Spooky Sightings"

From Rizwan Virk's 10-31-22 NBC News article entitled "Government UFO Report Timed for Halloween Seems to Downplay Spooky Sightings":

Right in time for Halloween, U.S. intelligence agencies were due on Monday to deliver a classified progress report on UFOs to Congress, with an unclassified summary of the report expected to be posted online later this week. Earlier this month, NASA also announced the 16 members of its new unclassified independent team, consisting of prominent scientists, an astronaut and a science journalist, to look at the phenomenon from “a scientific perspective.”

Monday’s report comes after Congress called for the establishment of a permanent office to study UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena, the government’s new and improved term for UFOs) at the Pentagon last year and then held its first public hearing on the topic in more than 50 years this spring. That hearing discussed an unclassified report issued by a Department of Defense task force in 2021.

Many UFO investigation proponents like myself were underwhelmed by the Pentagon’s unclassified 2021 report, which offered an explanation for only one of the 144 incidents the department said were being investigated. But at least it correctly acknowledged that it couldn’t rule out any explanation, including extraterrestrial origins. After all, in some of the incidents, Navy pilots publicly stated that they’d encountered exotic objects that were “not of this world” and “accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

But leaked details and communications from officials ahead of Monday’s report and the announcement of NASA’s new team suggested that some in the government are eager to put the issue to rest without a full, open-minded investigation — just as it did in the last open attempt to get to the bottom of the phenomena back in the 1960s [...].

There is now a danger that the NASA study, which is also supposed to be objective, may not live up to this scientific ideal. For one thing, NASA’s study is only looking at unclassified data. “Most of the interesting data from the past is classified,” Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb told me in an email. Loeb is head of the Galileo Project, one of the few academic projects that’s trying to generate new data on UFOs. (Disclosure: I am an adviser to the Galileo Project and other UFO-related endeavors, though I receive no financial returns from them.)

While some of NASA’s top brass and study team members have tried to reassure the public that they don’t have pre-conclusions, others have already raised concerns. Loeb points out: “Some members of the panel expressed explicit views against scientific research on UAP. Their selection raises concern about the neutrality of the panel.”

For example, panelist Nadia Drake, a science journalist, made her position clear in a tweet thread before she was named to be part of the panel: “I don’t buy for a second that anyone involved reasonably expects to find evidence of extraterrestrial technology here” [...].

Members of Congress, the former director of national intelligence, President Barack Obama and even a former head of the CIA have said the same thing: that there is something not yet explainable, and dare I say it on this Halloween, even spooky, flying around our night skies. Einstein himself used the term spooky when confronted with science he didn’t understand or believe in — quantum entanglement, which turned out to be real and this year was recognized with a Nobel Prize.

For NASA’s panel to avoid stigmatizing the study of UFOs and spur the science needed for a thorough investigation, my request to members is simple: Please try not to prejudge the conclusions of the study, which is what all science should be about. Furthermore, at some stage NASA will need access to the classified data.

To read the entire article, click HERE.