The Anomaly of UAPs

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John Defterios: There are some things that you look at and say, we don't understand this. The reason they couldn't chase them down is because they're much further away than they thought. It made me wonder whether pilots are working in conditions that make them more susceptible to seeing things that are hard to explain. And one of the things that I think I certainly have learned through this process is how difficult it is for a pilot to sometimes assess distance to an object.

Last week, Nasa held the first public meeting of a panel established to investigate sightings of UFOs. It came just before a whistleblower former intelligence official told the Debrief that the US government had ‘intact and partially intact’ craft of non-human origin. Ian Sample talks to Prof David Spergel, the independent chair of Nasa’s panel, about why this is happening now, what they hope to find and why there is so much stigma attached to this field. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod