Fans of classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon ‘The Jetsons’ will know it is set in a comical future where flying cars are a common sight. 

Meanwhile, cult 90s film ‘The Fifth Element’ depicts Brue Willis as a flying taxi driver, shuttling passengers around the skies of New York in the 23rd century. 

But according to experts, the days of flying taxis being consigned to fiction will be over in just a few years. 

Under a year from now, the first commercial air taxi will ferry visitors on trips around Paris at the 2024 Summer Olympics, finally heralding the arrival of the technology. 

Sir Stephen Hillier, chair of the Civil Aviation Authority, thinks we are on the brink of a ‘flying taxi’ boom and the brink of a ‘new revolution’. 

Mr Hillier has called for a global common standard for flying taxis ahead of the ‘widespread’ adoption of the vehicles, which will utilise space in the air and reduce congestion on roads. 

And just like the electric car revolution that is taking place on the ground, most flying taxi will be electric, meaning they won’t emit toxic pollutants. 

‘If we go outside at the moment and look up into the air, it’s mostly empty,’ Mr Hillier told the Financial Times.

‘And we will now have the technologies to make much more use of that environment than we have in the past.’

Investors around the world are pumping millions of dollars into flying taxi projects, which are going through various stages of testing.  

Vertical Aerospace, based in Bristol, is one UK firm working towards building the fleet of electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, as part of a £2.8 billion ($4 billion) project. 

VTOL aircraft can take off straight up into the air rather than having to build speed along the ground first, reducing the need for runway space. 

In a few years, VTOL could potentially take off and land at airfields in the outskirts of a city, or even on landing pads at the top of skyscrapers.

Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic will purchase up to 150 Vertical Aerospace’s aircraft, called VA-X4, to deliver a Virgin Atlantic branded short haul network around some of the UK’s busiest cities. 

Stephen Fitzpatrick, Vertical Aerospace CEO and founder, told the Times that flying vehicles are safe and have a failure rate of one in a billion. 

‘The technology we need to make these air taxis, we have today,’ he said. 

‘And we are in the process of demonstrating that they meet the very, very rigorous safety standards that you need to manufacture commercial aircraft. 

‘So we’re in the certification phase, and probably two to three years away from the first commercial air taxis hitting the market.’ 

Fitzpatrick thinks electric taxis will be cheaper and quicker than taxis on the ground.

For example, an air taxi from Heathrow to Canary Wharf would cost £50 with a journey time of eight to ten minutes.

In comparison, a traditional taxi normally takes up to two hours to do the same route during rush hour and costs £150.

Another company, Electron Aviation which is based in the Netherlands, plans to launch a ‘sky-hailing service’ akin to Uber that users could book through an app. 

Electron Aviation’s fleet of 186mph (300kph) battery-electric air taxis are expected to become a reality in Netherlands and the UK in 2027.

Although the firm’s fleet won’t be VTOL – they’ll launch like commercial planes – this shouldn’t be an issue as they’ll make use of existing airport runways. 

Meanwhile, German company Volocopter will be the one to transport passengers around Paris at the Summer Olympics next year. 

It’s already performed a successful test flight of its VoloCity VTOL, which looks like more like a helicopter or a giant drone than a car. 

Earlier this month, UK firm Bristow Group announced it had order two VoloCity machines with the aim of establishing a commercial passenger and cargo service in the US and UK. 

When VoloCity does get put to work at the Olympics, it will be ‘a great milestone’ that would help to drive the industry forwards, Fitzpatrick admitted to the Times. 

However, it will be a while before any big city transforms into something worthy of the Jetsons, complete with elaborate robots and holograms. 

‘We’re going to need more infrastructure, we’re going to need more pilots, but the technology is there today,’ he said. 

The CIA is set to launch its own ChatGPT-style AI tool to help sift through mountains of data for clues in ongoing investigations. 

Intended to mirror the famed OpenAI tech, the Central Intelligence Agency’s latest initiative will use artificial intelligence to help analysts better access open-source intelligence, agency officials said. 

The CIA’s Open Source Enterprise division developed the tech, which is also intended to be rolled out across the US government’s 18 intelligence agencies in an effort to rival China‘s growing intelligence capabilities. 

‘We’ve gone from newspapers and radio, to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable television, to basic internet, to big data, and it just keeps going,’ said Randy Nixon, director of the CIA’s AI division. 

Nixon noted that analyzing the level of data across the web is a significant challenge that the AI program would help handle, adding: ‘We have to find the needles in the needle field.’

The push to add artificial intelligence to the US military and intelligence apparatus comes amid mounting pressure to compete with China’s advancing potency on the world stage. 

In particular, China is feared to be stretching well ahead in the race to command artificial intelligence and is seeking to become the global leader by 2030, according to Bloomberg. 

In an ominous glimpse into the nation’s use of the programs, in 2021 China developed a ‘prosecutor’ that could identify and press charges with a reported 97 percent accuracy. 

In contrast, America’s law enforcement sphere has also come under fire for struggling to utilize the power of AI in investigations, but Nixon said the new program will aid in condensing the unprecedented levels of information floating through the web.

Among the CIA’s new capabilities under the AI tool will be the capacity to see the original source of any information that they are viewing. 

Nixon added that, like ChatGPT, the program will see agents use a chat feature to receive information as succinctly as possible.

‘Then you can take it to the next level and start chatting and asking questions of the machines to give you answers, also sourced,’ he continued. 

‘Our collection can just continue to grow and grow with no limitations other than how much things cost.’

Nixon was drafted in as the CIA’s new Open Source Enterprise director in January, where he was expected to ‘speed up the agency’s development in open source intelligence just as the field is causing increasing concern and sparking rivalry in Washington’, according to Intelligence Online. 

China’s embrace of artificial intelligence has worried some that America could be left behind, with the nation even introducing an AI news anchor earlier this year. 

To make up its ever-growing AI operation, his division will reportedly draw in information from publicly and commercially available sources. 

However, the push to implement AI into intelligence gathering comes at a time when experts are still unsure of the technology’s red flags, including the potential for the CIA’s information to be accessed in the open internet. 

While it won’t be made available for Washington lawmakers, Nixon said the program will be rolled out across all 18 of the US government’s intelligence agencies, including the FBI, the NSA, and all military branches. 

In August, the Defense Department launched a task force to explore using the tech, including a view to better understanding its downsides. 

Months before in May, the director of the NSA, Gilbert Herrera, told Bloomberg that the intelligence community was still trying to ‘find a way to take benefit of these large models without violating privacy.’ 

In the announcement of the new AI initiative, the CIA reportedly did not detail how it would protect the information it gathers from the seemingly vulnerable technology, nor which model it would use. 

Nevertheless, Nixon stressed the need to keep up with the unrelenting amount of data streaming throughout the internet. 

‘The scale of how much we collect and what we collect on has grown astronomically over the last 80-plus years,’ he said. ‘So much so that this could be daunting and at times unusable for our consumers.’

He added that the Ai tool would help analysts work like never before, because ‘where the machines are pushing you the right information, one where the machine can auto-summarize, group things together.’ 

• Scientists used supercomputer simulations to understand the origin of the rings
• A collision between two icy moons could have led to their formation 

By Xantha Leatham Deputy Science Editor For The Daily Mail

Published: 19:01 EDT, 26 September 2023 | Updated: 20:12 EDT, 26 September 2023

NASA has revealed its $1 billion plan to crash the International Space Station (ISS) back to Earth.

The space agency is set to decommission the orbiting laboratory in 2031 due to stresses on the structure that have accumulated over time.

NASA will pay any company that creates a ‘space-tug’ design, a craft powerful enough to pull the ISS from its orbit and send it toward our planet.

The agency is calling the space tug a US Deorbit Vehicle (USDV), which will nudge the ISS from 175 miles above Earth’s surface to about 75 miles, where it will begin its final descent into the Pacific Ocean. 

Proposals are due no later than November 17, and the ISS retirement plan will begin in 2026 when NASA lets the craft start to decay naturally.

The plan’s first step is to let the ship begin to decay and not re-boost it so it stays in orbit.

During this time, the atmospheric drag will reduce the orbit from around 250 miles above the surface to 200 miles.

However, this will take a few years to happen.

In 2030, the crew on the ISS will make the final descent to Earth and bring any crucial equipment.

The ISS will continue to move closer to Earth, reaching the ‘Point of no return’ at 175 miles above the surface.

And this is where the $1 billion space tug will swoop in and give the ISS a little push from orbit.

The station will begin re-entry between 75 miles and 50 miles above the surface.

The external skin of modules will melt away, and then the exposed hardware will vaporize as the ISS soars 18,000 miles per hour through Earth’s atmosphere.

Any of it that survives re-entry will be targeted to fall in Point Nemo, a region of the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and South America often used as a spacecraft graveyard – at least 260 craft have been laid to rest there.

‘The decommissioning plan for the space station is the execution of a responsible, controlled, and targeted deorbit into a remote ocean area,’ NASA shared in a statement.

During descent through the Earth’s atmosphere, the space station would burn, break up, and vaporize into fragments of various sizes. 

‘Some fragments would likely survive the thermal stresses of re-entry. Environmental impacts of these fragments within the anticipated impact area are expected to be small. 

‘To best protect people and property on Earth, the most remote areas of the ocean are targeted.’

President Ronald Regan announced the construction of the ISS during his January 25, 1984 State of the Union Address, noting NASA will have it completed in 10 years.

Then, on December 4, 1998, the first US component of the ship launched, and two years later, it officially began operation.

The station has hosted more than 250 visitors from 20 countries since the first crew arrived in November 2000. 

NASA originally planned to decommission the ISS after 15 years of operation – but that timeline has since been surpassed.

But the massive orbiting laboratory shows wear and tear, forcing NASA to say farewell to its faithful ship.

The station’s safe deorbit is the shared responsibility of the five space agencies — including NASA, CSA (Canadian Space Agency), (ESA) European Space Agency, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), and the State Space Corporation Roscosmos.

Each is responsible for managing and controlling the hardware it provides.

The station was designed to be interdependent and relies on contributions from across the partnership.

The US, Japan, Canada, and ESA participating countries have committed to operating the station through 2030 and Russia through at least 2028.

NASA said it examined several options for decommissioning the ISS, including disassembly and return to Earth, boosting it to a higher orbit to stay in space or leaving it in orbit to decay until it randomly falls to Earth.

The other options fail because the structure was not designed to be easily disassembled in space, the craft needs to be re-boosted to stay in orbit and allowing it to decay in orbit could pose risks on Earth.

NASA does not want the ISS’s retirement to be the end of its hold over space and has already launched a replacement plant. 

The American space agency does not want to lose access to these benefits when the station ends, so it has launched a transition plan – asking private companies to develop a space station. 

Multiple companies want to operate a commercial station, including Axiom Space, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Northrup Grumman.

‘The International Space Station is entering its third and most productive decade as a groundbreaking scientific platform in microgravity,’ said Robyn Gatens, director of the International Space Station at NASA Headquarters.

‘This third decade is one of the results, building on our successful global partnership to verify exploration and human research technologies to support deep space exploration, continue to return medical and environmental benefits to humanity, and lay the groundwork for a commercial future in low-Earth orbit.

More than seven in 10 Americans believe the Biden administration is withholding information about UFOs, a DailyMail.com poll has revealed.

And nearly four in 10 think that Earth has been visited by aliens from another planet in the past fifty years, according to the survey. 

We put several UFO-themed questions to 1,000 voters following a series of unprecedented Congressional hearings and a NASA investigation into unidentified craft flying in our skies.

More than four in 10 respondents said they would feel safer if Donald Trump were President of the US if aliens were to invade Earth, while a third said they would feel safer under Joe Biden. The rest were unsure.

J.L Partners conducted the poll from September 15 through 20, asking questions to Americans by phone, text and in its dedicated app.

Participants ranged in age from 18 to over 65. Scarlett Maguire, Director at JLP, said: ‘Biden’s approval rating isn’t the only thing that has fallen to Earth recently. 

‘Only four in 10 Americans believe recent reports of UFOs are human in origin, and just one in four rule out extra-terrestrials having visited in the last 50 years. 

‘And, perhaps unsurprisingly, for a demographic that embraces astrology, 18-29-year-old women are one of the groups most likely to think we have already had a close encounter of the third kind.’

‘As with crime and the economy, the public’s trust in the Biden administration’s handling of UFOs doesn’t survive first contact. 

‘Even Democrats don’t believe they have been told everything about UFOs. And when Mars attacks, there is only one man in town to save the day: more Americans – including independents – would choose Trump over Biden to defend them.’

When asked about the recent strange sightings by US Navy pilots, a total of 27 percent said they were ‘probably alien in origin.’

A 41 percent majority said the strange flying objects were of human origin, and 32 percent said they did not know.

However, males, Black voters, non-graduates and Republicans were among the highest groups to believe the sightings were extraterrestrial in origin.

The poll revealed that more Americans than not believe the Biden Administration is withholding information about UFOs. 

More than 66 percent of Republicans answered ‘definitely’, compared to just 22 percent of Democrats.

DailyMail.com also asked respondents if aliens attacked Earth, who do they think we would be safer under, Joe Biden or Donald Trump.

Forty-three percent voted for Trump, 32 percent said Biden and 25 percent gave ‘don’t know’ as their answer. 

Every age, race, education level and political party chose Trump. 

Trump appeared on the ‘Hugh Hewitt’ podcast this month, where he said he was briefed on UFOs during his presidency. 

The former president explained how he spoke with ‘a couple of people from the Air Force’ who experienced strange objects in the sky.

When asked if he believes in them, Trump responded: ‘I have, I always have an open mind.’

Biden has steered clear of the topic in interviews.

In 2021, the president was asked about Barak Obama’s statements that there is footage and records of objects in the sky — these unidentified aerial phenomena – but said he does not know what they are.

Biden responded: ‘I would ask him again.’

However, earlier this year, he announced an interagency group to look into unidentified objects in US airspace.

White House National Security Spokesman John Kirby, who briefed reporters in February, announced the formation of the inquiry team. 

‘The president, through his national security adviser, has today directed an interagency team to study the broader policy implications for detection, analysis and disposition of unidentified aerial objects that pose either safety or security risks,’ Kirby said.

He explained that the team will include ‘every element’ of the government and stressed its formation was intended to ‘redouble’ the United States’ efforts to understand and, hopefully, prevent incidents with what he described as ‘high-altitude, low-speed craft.’

A tranche of UFO videos, including some never-before-seen, were quietly released by the US Customs and Border Protection, the agency responsible for keeping terrorists and their weapons out of the country.

The agency uploaded 10 videos showing craft moving strangely in our skies.

The videos were released on August 9 without warning, a press release or much in the way of context, only to be discovered by UFO enthusiasts and online investigators last week.

The videos document a fighter jet pursued by a baffling flying orb, as well as something that appears to be a propeller-powered hang-glider and yet another apparent floating orb, hovering this time near a parked 16-wheeler truck.

But the enigmatic nature of the drop — which offered little detail regarding the times and locations of these sightings, plus more than a few sweeping redactions — has left more questions than answers.

When you become familiar with someone, you start to recognize their face pretty quickly – but if you see them upside down, studies show it’s harder to tell.

Known as the face inversion effect (FIE), scientists have long been trying to work out whether it’s an evolutionary or learned behavior.

‘Face processing has received a lot of research attention and it’s a relatively well-developed research area, but the brain is complicated and hard to study so we still have only a dim understanding of how face processing works,’ Brad Duchaine, a psychologist at Dartmouth College told DailyMail.com. 

Now, a study by Duchaine’s team provides a unique opportunity to study how we perceive faces.  They studied a Brazilian man named Claudio Vieira de Oliveira who has a congenital joint disorder that causes his head to be rotated 180 degrees.

SCROLL DOWN TO TAKE OUR UPSIDE-DOWN CELEB QUIZ. THE ANSWERS ARE AT THE VERY BOTTOM.

Because of the position of his head, Vieira de Oliveira mostly sees peoples’ faces inversely. Researchers tested his recognition ability in 2015 and 2019.

The researchers showed Vieira de Oliveira upright and inverted faces, and wanted to study his detection and identity-matching abilities.

Upright faces were those with eyes above the mouth, and inverse faces were those with eyes below the mouth, the study noted.

Researchers determined that if Vieira de Oliveira identified upright faces better than inverted faces, it would mean recognition is based more on experience since this is how he usually perceives people.

Vieira de Oliveira performed similarly on upright and inverted faces, indicating that both evolution and experience impact our ability to perceive faces.

When shown upright faces, Vieira de Oliveira was accurate 61 percent of the time. When shown inverted faces, he was accurate 68 percent of the time.  

Vieira de Oliveira was born with arthrogryposis multiplex congenita, a condition that restricts motion in in multiple joints and muscle weakness, and his parents were told he wouldn’t survive past birth. 

However, Vieira de Oliveira currently works as a tax accountant, and has given motivational speeches and written an autobiography.

‘Prior to this study, nothing was known about how a person who has seen lots of faces mismatched to their own face perform with upright and inverted faces,’ Duchaine said. 

‘These results indicate that people with typical face perception are extremely good with upright faces both because of the experience they have had with them and because their visual systems have processes designed to process upright faces,’ he said.

They also showed Vieira de Oliveira ‘Thatcherized’ faces, or faces where certain features like the mouth and eyes are flipped on an upright face, or kept upright on an inverse face.

Looking at the ‘Thatcherized’ faces, Vieira de Oliveira performed better seeing upright faces with altered features. 

 Researchers said they don’t understand why Vieira de Oliveira recognized the Thatcherized faces well, but assume it has to do with a different visual mechanism apart from detecting faces and identities. 

‘Nearly everyone has far more experience with upright faces and ancestors whose reproduction was influenced by their ability to process upright faces, so it’s not easy to pull apart the influence of experience and evolved mechanisms tailored for upright faces in typical participants,’ Duchaine said in a press release.

The researchers want to continue learning about the differences between how evolution and experience factor into how people perceive faces.

They also want to study the different judgements people make when they see faces, such as how they perceive attraction and trustworthiness. 

Look below to see how well you recognize some celebrities whose images have been flipped.

Answers: Beyoncé, Tom Brady, Gerard Butler, George Lucas, Shaquille O’Neal, Bradley Cooper, Catherine Middleton, Princess of Wales, Zendaya, Rihanna, Lady Gaga

•  The feature follows in the footsteps of voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa

By Jim Norton Technology Editor

Published: 20:46 EDT, 25 September 2023 | Updated: 20:56 EDT, 25 September 2023

• Artificial intelligence system can detect signs of life with 90 per cent accuracy
• It signifies a ‘significant advance’ in our abilities to discover life beyond Earth

By Xantha Leatham Deputy Science Editor For The Daily Mail

Published: 15:00 EDT, 25 September 2023 | Updated: 15:00 EDT, 25 September 2023

Merely days after the release of its new operating system – iOS 17 – Apple has had to issue urgent updates. 

iOS 17.0.1, now available globally, fixes three security flaws that left devices exposed to ‘malware’ – malicious computer software. 

The update is for all iPhone models still supported by the tech giant – so those released in 2018 and later (including iPhone XS and the 2nd generation iPhone SE). 

However, if you’ve got yourself a brand new iPhone 15 in the last few days, you’ll need an even newer update – iOS 17.0.2. 

iOS 17.0.2 also fixes an issue that may prevent the transfer of data directly from an older iPhone during setup.

Therefore, if you have the new iPhone 15, you should update it to iOS 17.0.2 before you try transferring data from your old device, not after.

To get either of the latest updates for your iPhone (or iPad, which is also affected), you just need to head to your device’s Settings and select ‘General’ followed by ‘Software Update’.

Tapping ‘Download and Install’ should start the update, which could take a few minutes to complete. 

Apple’s new iOS mobile operating system, iOS 17, was released last week, a few days before the iPhone 15 hit the shelves (although iOS 17 was made available for other recent iPhone models too). 

In a web post, Apple disclosed the three security flaws that are affecting iOS 17.0, which will be fixed in minutes as long as you update. 

One of these flaws allowed a malicious app to be able ‘to bypass signature validation’ – meaning it may be able to run without the user noticing. 

Apple disclosed the flaws following tip-offs from Google and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab research group. 

iOS 17.0.1 – which is for all recent iPhone models apart from the new iPhone 15 – fixes the bugs.  

Meanwhile, iOS 17.0.2 includes the three security fixes of iOS 17.0.1, but it also corrects the iPhone 15’s data transfer issue, the tech giant said in another post.

If you have any one of the new iPhone 15 models, you should notice in your Settings that the newest software update available is iOS 17.0.2.

iOS 17.0.2 fixes the data transfer issue that is issue specific to the iPhone 15 lineup, so the update is not necessary for older iPhone models. 

Therefore, if you have an older iPhone and you see the latest update available is iOS 17.0.1, you don’t not have to worry that iOS 17.0.2 is not available. 

The most important thing is updating your iPhone from iOS 17.0 (or iPadOS 17.0 if you have an iPad) because it leaves your device vulnerable to bugs. 

Once this is done you should be able to enjoy the new functionality offered by iOS 17, as intended by Apple. 

The generation of software includes several exciting features, including a Live Voicemail tool and the ability to share your contact details simply by touching your iPhone to another. 

iOS 17 was released a few days before iPhone 15 hit the shelves, leading to packed crowds from London to Beijing. 

The standard range of new iPhones start at £799 and are equipped with a new titanium frame, USB-C charging port and new artificial intelligence features. 

The two most expensive options in the iPhone 15 family, the Pro and Pro Max, reach a whopping £1,499 and £1,599, depending on storage. 

Britain should follow America’s lead and create its own UFO taskforce to investigate potential extraterrestrial sightings, experts have said.

They accused the UK Government of failing to take the issue seriously enough and warned that it could have serious implications for the country’s defence capabilities.

Nick Pope, who investigated UFOs for the British military in the 1990s before the unit was disbanded, said it was ‘outrageous’ that ministers are not taking ‘meaningful action’ to probe unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) — more commonly known as unidentified flying objects.

‘The Ministry of Defence (MoD) needs to restart UAP investigations, a task force of some sort needs to be set up, and the Defence Committee needs to start holding the MoD to account on UAP, as the Armed Services Committees are doing in the US Congress, in both the Senate and the House,’ he told MailOnline.

Mr Pope accused defence officials of ‘falling back on a lazy, closed-minded “it can’t be, so it isn’t” mindset’, meaning potential foreign threats to UK shores could be missed.

The MoD closed its UFO desk in 2009 and nothing has ever replaced it.

Prior to this, it carried out what at the time was a highly-secretive and extensive UFO investigation of more than 10,000 possible sightings over several decades — many of which were by military personnel.

Known as the Project Condign report, it concluded that 80 per cent of the sightings were easily explained, 19 per cent were secret military craft and just 1 per cent were mysterious in origin.

However, the MoD accepted that there are always going to be UAP and that those which are unexplained are likely an ‘an unknown kind of plasma’ and not of concern. 

‘The MoD has consistently stated that no UFO/UAP sighting has ever shown a threat to the UK, therefore they are of no defence significance and as a result the MoD is not interested,’ said Philip Mantle, the former director of investigations at the British UFO Research Association.

He told MailOnline that for this reason it would be ‘pointless’ to set up a UFO taskforce.

‘The MoD are not interested and science in general usually gives the subject a wide berth,’ Mr Mantle added.

‘One thing that is clear, however, is that the UFO phenomenon, whatever it may be, does not recognise any international borders, therefore any such study surely must be international in scope rather than national.’

In the US, NASA last week released its highly-anticipated report into more than 800 potential alien sightings over a period of three decades.

The space agency’s independent panel of experts stressed that there was ‘no reason to conclude’ that any were extraterrestrial in origin, but warned that mysterious flying objects were a ‘self-evident’ threat to American airspace. 

Mr Pope said that if the US was worried about this then Britain, as an NATO ally, should be too.

He added: ‘The UK can make a significant contribution to the wider search for the truth about UAP, by leveraging its world class intelligence community imagery analysis resources and capabilities. 

‘The bottom line is that we need action. 

‘Just as lawmakers in the US – Republicans and Democrats alike – are taking up this issue, UK Parliamentarians should start asking the MoD some hard questions, not accept boilerplate responses, and ensure that meaningful action is taken by setting up a task force modeled on the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.’

A petition has also been set up calling for the UK to set up an investigatory office on UFOs/UAPs but has so far attracted just 1,500 signatures since May.

It requires 10,000 for the Government to respond to it and 100,000 to be considered for debate in Parliament.

The petition states that the office ‘would be primarily to research and investigate reports of UFOs (unidentified flying objects) and UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) over the United Kingdom and also assist and support witnesses.’

Even though they poured cold water on the extraterrestrial hypothesis, NASA’s experts did not deny the possibility of a ‘potential unknown alien technology operating in Earth’s atmosphere’. 

Their 33-page report called for NASA to utilise its technological might to continue studying UFOs because many cases remain unsolved — and researchers still have no idea what some of these sightings are.

NASA chief Bill Nelson announced that a new director for UFO research would help implement the panel’s recommendations. 

A separate UFO investigation by the Pentagon is also under way, but with the intelligence and military communities.