Do we really think NASA would bother creating a group to zealously research some of these reported UAP claims if “birds” were a strong possibility? I can’t. -_-
I don't think that NASA has set up a group to research UAPs as of yet. The committee that just streamed its open meeting was set up to consider how best to research UAPs, what kind of data they feel they need and similar questions. I believe that this committee was preliminary to setting up a NASA UAP research office, which both the committee and the NASA Administrator seem to favor.
(NASA seems to want to argue that it's a positive that they aren't considering classified reports, Except that they themselves admit that military sighting reports are classified if they contain data obtained by classified sensors. Which presumably means some large percentage of them.)
The Defense Department does have a UAP research body, Sean Kirkpatrick's AARO.
I believe that the DoD has instructed military personnel to report sightings that they feel are "anomalous" in Sean Kirkpatrick's sense, namely sightings that appear extraordinary and inexplicable to the one making the report. Standardized reporting procedures have been put in place to facilitate that.
Then the investigators set about trying to reduce the reports to known explanations. (Birds, balloons, cavorting whales or whatever.) Reducing the unknown to the known is what 'explanation'
is, after all. So a sighting that appears 'anomalous' to the one making the report might not remain anomalous if a plausible and convincing explanation can be found for it in terms of what is already known and understood. The 'anomalous' file tends to shrink over time.
Some large percentage of reports (>50%) aren't reducible in that way, mainly because the available information is insufficient to make a determination.
And some small percentage of reports (2-5%) appear to show characteristics that seem to resist explanation and appear to be incompatible with conventional explanations: well-attested exotic aerodynamic behavior and so on.
Getting back to your point Wegs, I agree very strongly with you that what we aren't seeing with NASA or the AARO is an
a-priori assumption based on pre-existing faith that
all UAP reports must somehow be reducible to what is already known. They explicitly oppose and want to eliminate the stigma that dismisses all these kind of reports as "woo". They don't automatically dismiss those making the reports as tinfoil-hatted cultists or people who are making elementary logical or perceptual errors.
They actually hold open the possibility that there might be something interesting and even important to discover here. Something that isn't found among the ideas that are already known and believed by the "skeptics".
It's the difference between an open and closed worldview, I guess.
