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

Doctors have hit back against a controversial study that linked diet soda to autism.

Research by the University of Texas (UT) found boys diagnosed with autism were three times as likely to have mothers who drank diet soda daily while pregnant or breastfeeding.

They theorized that aspartame, the popular sugar substitute found in Diet Coke, may release toxins that cause oxidative stress in cells and tissues — a process linked to autism. 

But Dr Deirdre Tobias, a nutritionist at Harvard University who was not involved in the research, told DailyMail.com it was ‘shocking that the authors would feel confident enough in this design to draw those conclusions.’

Dr Rachel Moseley, principal academic in psychology at Bournemouth University in the UK, told DailyMail.com: ‘It would be highly premature and irresponsible to suggest a relationship between aspartame and autism based on this study. As every scientist knows, correlation between two things does not mean that the one causes the other.’

Dr Tobias said the study was ‘extremely flawed’ because the data was collected retrospectively and based on the mother’s memory of how much aspartame they consumed.

Dr Moseley added that the sample size is small and was recruited from a panel of parents with an autistic child.

‘Since autism has a large genetic component, having one autistic child is already associated with a higher risk of having another autistic child,’ she said.

‘Moreover, the authors did not rigorously confirm whether either or both of the parents were themselves autistic.’

In the study, the diets of mothers of 235 children with autism spectrum disorder were compared to a control group of mothers of 121 children who didn’t have autism.

The mothers completed questionnaires that asked: ‘While you were pregnant or breastfeeding your child, how often did you drink diet drinks containing artificial sweeteners?’

Diet Coke, Diet Dr Pepper, Diet Sprite, Crystal Light, sugar-free Kool-Aid, and Slim-Fast were suggested as prompts.

Each mother was also asked: ‘While you were pregnant or breastfeeding your child, how many little packets of low-calorie sweeteners (such as Sweet ‘N Low, Equal or Splenda) did you use in your coffee, tea, or other foods and beverages?’

Intake of the three leading sweeteners — Equal/Nutrasweet (blue), Splenda (yellow), and Sweet’N Low (pink) — was recorded. 

The researchers found that males diagnosed with autism disorder were between 3.1 and 3.5 times more likely to have mothers who reported an aspartame intake equivalent to one or more diet sodas a day during pregnancy or breastfeeding, compared with male controls. 

The association was greatest among males with non-regressive autism — where the condition is apparent before 18 months, also known as early onset.

The study did not find a statistically significant trend in autistic girls.

Conditions such as obesity and diabetes in mothers are associated with an increased risk of autism in children and may also influence a decision to use diet products. 

The researchers did not collect data on these risk factors, nor smoking, drinking, birth weight, prematurity, or the age of the parents. They did have data for household income, educational attainment, and ethnicity, which they adjusted for in the results.

Dr Tobias added that the three artificial sweeteners they examined are ‘completely different compounds, metabolized very differently in humans, and have been extensively evaluated for their safety. 

‘Thus, the fact that the signal for aspartame was essentially the same as the other chemicals further points to the bias in this study, perhaps due to errors in the mothers’ recall or other factors related to women who chose diet sodas.

‘It is extremely unlikely that any association they are observing has anything to do with the chemical aspartame itself.’

The study was published in the journal Nutrients.

During pregnancy, aspartame can cross the placenta and accumulate in fetal tissue. 

The substance can also cross into breastmilk, but other studies have suggested the mother’s body rapidly breaks it down.

Autism affects one in 36 children, meaning that more than 90,000 children are born annually with the developmental disorder in the US.

It is characterized by problems with social communication and interaction, difficulty expressing oneself and repetitive behaviors and interests.

Autism is a lightning rod issue and often comes up in antivaxxer messaging. 

In a recent poll, one-quarter of American adults said they believed the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism – a widely studied and discredited claim that emerged in the 1990s.

Claims that shots can lead to autism have been peddled by anti-vaxxers for almost 25 years, but the link has been repeatedly disproven.

The disgraced British physician Andrew Wakefield made the claim in a now-retracted 1998 Lancet study.

Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, publicly described the research as ‘fundamentally flawed’ in 2004 – nine years after it was published.

Dr Horton alleged that Andrew Wakefield, the gastroenterologist behind the paper, was paid by a group pursuing lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.

The prestigious medical journal finally retracted the paper in 2010.

Just three months after his paper was pulled, Wakefield was banned from practicing medicine in Britain by the General Medical Council.

In 2011, the British Medical Journal conducted a damning probe into the findings of Wakefield’s original study.

Its investigation found only two of the 12 children included developed autistic symptoms after being vaccinated – as opposed to the eight Wakefield claimed.

Since then, studies involving millions of children have failed to find a link between the MMR vaccine and the neurodevelopmental disorder.  

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.

A NASA contractor is reportedly looking to study ‘alien bodies’ that were presented to Mexico‘s Congress during a controversial UFO hearing.

Jaime Maussan, a veteran broadcast journalist and prolific ufologist who presented the corpses last week, told the DailyMail.com that an unnamed third-party contractor has been in contact with him about carrying out a ‘DNA investigation’ potentially on behalf of the US space agency.

The news comes just one week after NASA’s top UFO investigator Dr David Spergel was pressed about the purported alien corpses – and did not shut them down entirely.

Dr Spergel told reporters: ‘We don’t know the nature of those samples. My recommendation is, if you have something strange, make samples available to the world scientific community, and we’ll see what’s there.’

Maussan had first unveiled the pair of alleged 1,000-year-old bodies, reportedly unearthed in a Peruvian cave, during UFO hearings held by the General Congress of the United Mexican States — unleashing an international firestorm.

While Maussan heralded the bodies’ discovery as one of the most important in human history, his presentation has sparked an outcry from numerous scientists, anthropologists and even some dedicated UFO researchers. 

This week, the temperature of the debate climbed higher, with Peru’s Minister of Culture filing criminal charges accusing Maussan and his collaborators of robbing bodies from ancient graves.

As of 2022, Peru’s Culture Ministry has designated approximately 26,000 protected archaeological sites across the country, but has faced budget constraints in its efforts to secure these valuable artifacts from black market antiquities dealers.

But, as Maussan told the DailyMail.com, ‘I personally went to the Ministry of Culture, to ask them to do the investigation to get involved in this finding.’ 

‘They never did,’ according to Maussan. ‘We tried many, many times. We sent letters.’

‘And let me tell you something else,’ Maussan asked rhetorically, ‘You remember NASA saying that this should be investigated, and so on?’ 

‘A contractor from NASA took the challenge,’ Maussan answered. ‘They are a laboratory dedicated to the reading of DNA.’

Despite several attempts by the DailyMail.com, via phone and email, NASA’s office of public affairs could not yet be reached for comment.

For his part, Maussan expressed concern that too much transparency too early could upset the delicate investigations which, he says, are now underway.

When asked by the DailyMail.com, Mussaun declined to identify the NASA contractor by name. 

‘A contractor from NASA — it’s all I can tell you,’ he said. 

‘I won’t tell you the name. I want to keep this private,’ he said, ‘until they can do their investigation.’

But, the Mexican broadcaster who was once chief investigative reporter and editor of 60 Minutos, the country’s affiliate of the CBS television news magazine 60 Minutes, was nevertheless willing to speculate on the NASA contractor’s next steps. 

‘I think they’re going to Peru [then] they’re coming to Mexico,’ Maussan said, ‘to check on the bodies to take samples. They want to do their own DNA investigation.’

‘And we said yes! We are open, my friend.’

Maussan’s efforts to garner professional scientific interest in the potential of ‘ancient alien’ specimens from Latin America has spanned years, with some setbacks and some success, but never before at the present level of international scrutiny.

At a May 5, 2015, event in Mexico City, Maussan and a coalition of US ufologists presented now infamous photographic slides purported to document a recovered alien body from the long-rumored 1947 flying saucer crash at Roswell, New Mexico.

Efforts by a coalition of skeptics and dedicated UFO researchers, however, quickly put forward compelling evidence that the images depicted a child mummy, museum placard included, as displayed at the Mesa Verde Museum in Colorado.

Undaunted, Maussan returned with his first Peruvian ‘alien mummy’ in 2017, for a documentary on Gaia TV, which included analysis by Konstantin Korotkov, a professor of computer science and biophysics at Saint-Petersburg University,

In the ensuing speculation, some scientists have taken a crack at determining the origin of these specimens, including researchers at the Cyprus University of Technology as well as the retired CEO of Western Paleontological Laboratories.  

Debate continues on whether the specimens are truly alien, or were ritually made from human and llama remains by ancient indigenous populations, or were made more recently by the enterprising tomb-raiding huaqueros themselves. 

To complicate matters, the numerous Peruvian mummies brought to the public by Maussan vary in size and several more key characteristics. 

This week, Maussan’s associate, Dr. Jose Zalce Benitez, the director of the Scientific Institute for Health of the Mexican Navy, detailed x-rays, 3-D reconstruction and DNA analysis which he said has been carried out on the remains.

According to Benitez, scans showed that the specimens of the two latest mummies are each ‘a single skeleton’ and ‘complete organic being,’ contrary to suggestions they were made up of ‘different parts as some assumed.’

This analysis has its critics, including Elsa Tomasto-Cagigao, a respected Peruvian bio-anthropologist, who cited similar alleged finds that were found to be frauds.

‘What we said before still stands, they are presenting the same rehash as always and if there are people that keep believing that, what can we do?,’ she said.

Ultimately, Maussan maintains his conviction that the bodies merit deeper, professional scrutiny.

‘We know — we’re not stupid — that we need someone bigger than us, a university, or an institution, someone bigger, to investigate them,’ Maussan told the DailyMail.com Thursday.

‘Once that happens, everybody will realize this is the finding of the century or the millennium, or whatever you want to say,’ Maussan said. ‘I put my hands on the fire, to tell you that this is absolutely real.’

‘This is physical evidence, it’s not going to evaporate.’ 

 

By Victoria Allen Science Editor For The Daily Mail

Published: 14:00 EDT, 20 September 2023 | Updated: 02:10 EDT, 21 September 2023

• Eating cheese and dairy products  is associated with less cognitive decline
• Dairy eaters over 65 had better attention, memory and language skills

By Rebecca Whittaker For Mailonline

Published: 07:39 EDT, 18 September 2023 | Updated: 08:25 EDT, 18 September 2023

More than half of women who suffered trauma while giving birth have been put off having more children.

A snapshot poll of 1,000 members of the Mumsnet website found 79 per cent of those surveyed had experienced birth trauma.

Women can develop birth trauma after experiences such as an unplanned Caesarean section, emergency treatment, or a difficult labour with a long and painful delivery.

Almost two-thirds of mothers who experienced birth trauma said they felt a ‘lack of compassion’ from healthcare professionals during labour, while 44 per cent said language had been used which implied they were ‘a failure or to blame’ for their experience.

Some 53 per cent said the experience had put them off having more babies.

Almost two-thirds of those polled by Mumsnet did not believe healthcare workers did everything they could to prevent birth trauma.

Theo Clarke, MP for Stafford, who has spoken out about her own traumatic birth, in which she thought she was ‘going to die’ after suffering a third-degree tear and needing emergency surgery, has called for action.

The Conservative MP said: ‘These survey results are deeply upsetting.

‘They speak to my own experience of birth trauma and quite clearly to many, many other women’s horrendous experiences too.

‘The survey is clear that more compassion, education and better after-care for mothers who suffer birth trauma are desperately needed if we are to see an improvement in mums’ physical wellbeing and mental health.’

Mumsnet chief executive Justine Roberts said: ‘We hear daily on Mumsnet from women who have had deeply upsetting experiences of maternity care, and this latest research underlines that the majority of mothers experience birth trauma – whether physical or psychological.

‘This trauma has long-lasting effects and it’s clear that women are being failed at every stage of the maternity care process – with too little information provided beforehand, a lack of compassion from staff during birth, and substandard postnatal care for mothers’ physical and mental health.’

Kim Thomas, chief executive of the Birth Trauma Association, added: ‘A maternity system that puts women at the heart of care is not some kind of unfeasibly high goal – it is the bare minimum that women have the right to expect.’

It comes as a ‘heartbreaking’ report shows the rate of baby deaths in the UK has risen for the first time in seven years.

The rate of deaths had previously fallen year on year from 2013 to 2020.

But there were 2,473 stillbirths in 2021, compared to 2,292 the previous year, and 1,151 deaths of newborn babies in the first 28 days of life, up from 1,051.

Researchers who published the report, from the universities of Leicester and Oxford, said the rise occurred principally in babies dying in the womb before women went into labour.

That suggests the pandemic may have left women more reluctant to contact medical professionals, or unsure who to contact, if there was a reduction in their babies’ movements.

But researchers are unsure of the cause (SUBS – pls keep), and will be monitoring the figures for 2022 closely to see if this is a wider trend rather than a consequence of healthcare disruptions during Covid.

The Government is currently not on track to meet its ambitions to reduce rates of stillbirth and neonatal deaths by 2025, according to baby charity Tommy’s.

It comes amid ongoing issues with care in some hospital trusts, creating a postcode lottery for pregnant women.

Recurring problems seen in investigations have included failures to regularly monitor or chart the growth of babies in the womb, and inadequate responses when women report a change in the movements of their babies.

The new ‘State of the Nation’ report, from the MMBRACE-UK Collaboration of researchers, also highlights a higher risk of baby deaths for mothers from black and Asian backgrounds and those from economically deprived areas.

The cause of death remains unknown for one third of stillborn babies with a further third being due to problems with the placenta.

For babies who die soon after birth, the most common cause is inherited birth defects.

Elizabeth Draper, lead perinatal expert at MBRRACE-UK, said: ‘In 2021 the perinatal mortality rate increased in the UK for the first time in seven years.

‘It is important that the UK government, Royal Colleges, and Health Commissioners support rigorous reviews of all stillbirths and neonatal deaths to identify common themes that can improve clinical care and service provision, delivery, and organisation, reducing the need for future independent enquiries.’

Robert Wilson, head of the joint policy unit at Tommy’s and the charity Sands, said: ‘We keep hearing these heartbreaking statistics, but saving babies’ lives and tackling inequalities in pregnancy and baby loss are still not the political priorities they deserve to be.’

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care said: ‘We are committed to making the NHS the safest place in the world to give birth for all women, regardless of ethnicity or economic status.

‘To reduce disparities for women and babies from ethnic minorities and those living in the most deprived areas, NHS England has published guidance for local maternity systems, supported by £6.8 million.’

It’s long been known that men are more overconfident in their own abilities than women, which experts say helps to explain the gender pay gap.

But there is now evidence that even schoolboys are better at blowing their own trumpet.

In a new study, researchers from University College London showed teenagers 16 maths terms – including three that were fake. 

Boys were significantly more likely than girls to claim they had heard these nonsense terms often and understood them well.

So, can you tell which three terms are made up? 

Researchers looked at more than 40,000 teenagers across nine English-speaking countries, including England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

They were given a list of 16 maths terms, including real ones like cosine, quadratic function and rational number, and asked which they knew.

But the list included three fake maths terms – ‘declarative fraction’, ‘proper number’ and ‘subjunctive scaling’.

The results revealed that male participants were much more likely to claim to know the fake words.  

Unfortunately, for the less brazen girls, the study suggests male overconfidence may actually help boys in life.

That is because those who exaggerated their maths ability were also more likely to persevere in tasks, and to believe they could work difficult things out – from how to get somewhere, to the petrol consumption of a car.

That could make them more keen to dive in to difficult tasks, helping to get ahead in a later career.

Professor John Jerrim, who led the study from University College London, said: ‘An ability to big yourself up, as seen in these boys who claimed to know the made-up maths terms, may help to get a job or pay rise in later life.

‘If you believe you know lots of things, and are great, that overconfidence can be helpful, and it could help to explain the gender pay gap.’

The study found teens in the US and Canada were most likely to be over-claimers, followed by those in England, Wales, Australia and New Zealand.

It may be expected that no one likes a know-it-all, but in fact the teenagers who over-claimed their maths knowledge also reported being more popular in general.

The study divided the 15-year-olds into four groups, including the greatest and least ‘over-claimers’.

This was based on whether they said they had never heard of the three fake maths terms, had heard the terms once or twice, a few times or often, or claimed they knew the maths terms well and understood them.

Among the biggest over-claimers, 40 per cent claimed to understand proper numbers, 15 per cent claimed to understand declarative fractions and 10 per cent said the same for subjunctive scaling, with no one saying this among the lowest over-claimers.

Boys were more likely to be over-claimers even when their actual mathematical abilities were taken into account.

The study found the biggest over-claimers were more likely to believe in their own academic prowess.

They were more likely to express confidence in their ability to do eight tasks, including calculating the petrol consumption rate of a car, solving equations, using a train timetable to work out a journey time, or calculating a price after a discount.

Over-claimers, who were more likely to come from a privileged background based on information about their parents’ jobs, education and household possessions, also believed themselves better problem-solvers.

They rated their perseverance more highly, when asked to rate how much they agreed with statements about giving up easily, putting in effort, and seeing tasks through to the end.

The results come from a school questionnaire given in every country studied, and are published in the journal Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice.

NASA has published its first-ever study into hundreds of UFO sightings in recent decades and concluded there is ‘no reason’ to believe any cases are aliens – yet.

The unprecedented report, which comes as UFO fever reaches a tipping point in the US, analyzed more than 800 cases across three decades — albeit with a budget of just $100,000 and only about nine months to conduct their work.

The panel noted that, to date, most UFO sightings are recorded with sensors and other equipment intended for nonscientific purposes under accidental or ‘serendipitous’ circumstances.

The evidence from nearly all UFO cases, in other words, was not collected with enough scientific rigor to reach reliable conclusions.  

‘Coupled with incomplete data archiving and curation,’ the NASA panel wrote, ‘this means that the origin of numerous UAP [UFOs] remain uncertain.’

But, the panel did explain away one famous case, the US Navy’s ‘GOFAST’ UFO video: ‘We find the object moved about 390 meters during this 22-second interval,’ the new NASA report said, ‘which corresponds to an average speed of 40 mph.’ 

‘This is a typical wind speed at 13,000 feet,’ the NASA panel said, concluding it was probably a terrestrial, balloon-like object ‘most likely drifting with the wind.’

NASA’s panel of experts, however, had been primarily tasked with the goal of recommending new investigative avenues for future UFO research — advising on how the US space agency’s own tools could aid in the search for ET visitation.

NASA announced last year that it would review evidence regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), more commonly known as unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Their panel defined UAP as sightings ‘that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective.’

In their final report issued today, the NASA team elaborated that, in their scientific view, the bar for proof of extraterrestrial visitors to Earth must be kept high.

‘In the search for life beyond Earth, extraterrestrial life itself must be the hypothesis of last resort,’ the panel wrote, ‘the answer we turn to only after ruling out all other possibilities.’ 

‘As Sherlock Holmes said, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

During a question and answer session presenting their report, the head of NASA’s UAP advisory panel, astrophysicist David Spergel cautioned that more work will be needed to collect data on UAP, a process which he said has been marred by ‘a limited sample of events’ and ‘limited data.’

‘Stigma has limited reporting by pilots, both civilian and military,’ Spergel noted. ‘So we know there’s missing data.’ 

Back in May, NASA’s independent study team shared their preliminary observations — that up to 98 per cent of reported UAP sightings can be explained away.

Just 2 to 5 per cent are considered ‘possibly really anomalous’, the panel added, but a lack of high-quality data is hampering researchers’ ability to apply ‘rigorous scientific scrutiny’ to the mystery-solving.

These genuinely unexplained UAPs are defined as ‘anything that is not readily understandable by the operator or the sensor,’ or ‘something that is doing something weird,’ said team member Nadia Drake earlier this year.

NASA’s panel leader, David Spergel, echoed those comments today, adding ‘even if there are some events that, in the end, turn out to be something novel, most events are going to turn out to be conventional things: balloons, airplanes, and so on.’

While it had always been unlikely that today’s report would provide ground-breaking new information not revealed at the panel’s first public meeting in May, it did usher in the start of a new mission for the US space agency.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced the creation of a dedicated new position at the space agency, director of UAP research.

Nelson said that the newly appointed director will be tasked with developing and leading ‘the implementation of NASA’s vision for UAP research.’

‘We want to shift the conversation about UAPs from sensationalism to science,’ Nelson said. 

But the panel was guarded as to actual identity of NASA’s new UAP chief, with Spergel citing ‘nasty and hostile’ elements of the UFO ‘fringe’ who have ‘behaved badly’ and ‘harassed’ panel members on social media.

While NASA’s probes and rovers currently scour the solar system for any signs of alien life, its historic posture has been to ‘debunk’ sightings on our home planet.

But today, NASA’s panel acknowledged that its international suite of sensors and satellites do not collect data from the Earth at the level of detail needed to spot most modestly sized UFOs — as opposed to an apparently massive UAP like the infamous 1997 Phoenix Lights. 

‘We looked at NASA’s assets,’ Spergel said. 

‘While they provide a comprehensive picture of the ocean, the Earth’s surface and atmosphere for studying our evolving planet,’ he pointed out, ‘they typically do not have the resolution needed for UAP events.’

Spergel expressed the hope that these systems could be used to better understand the many ways that normal, terrestrial phenomena could appear unusual, so that the signal of a true ‘out of this world’ anomaly could be pulled out from that noise.

‘If you want to find something strange in a haystack,’ Spergel said, ‘you better know exactly what hay looks like.’ 

‘You need to know what typical, regular things look like, under all conditions.’ 

The mere existence of NASA’s advisory panel on UAP reflects a sea change in how seriously the US government has approached these airborne mysteries in recent years, partly due to concern that some could be related to foreign surveillance.

But the issue of aviation safety, for both commercial and military pilots, has also helped drastically change the conversation on UFOs in recent years. 

The reality of these pilots’ UAP reports, as NASA’s assistant deputy associate administrator for research, Dan Evans, explained today, ‘raises serious concerns about the safety of our skies.’

‘The threat to US airspace safety posed by UAP is self-evident,’ NASA’s panel concluded in their new report.

The panel added that it sees promise in future ‘systematic, evidenced-based’ data collection on UFOs via the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), which is already jointly administered by NASA.

‘This confidential and voluntary reporting system for pilots, air traffic controllers, and other professional aviation staff, receives approximately 100,000 reports per year,’ the new NASA report said. 

‘Although not initially designed for UAP collection,’ the panel wrote, ‘better harnessing it for commercial pilot UAP reporting would provide a critical database.’ 

Notably, NASA’s study is separate to the Pentagon’s investigation into UAPs, which saw US lawmakers hear first-hand accounts of UFO sightings from former members of the military earlier this year.

That Pentagon study, led by the Defense Department’s new All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) led by Pentagon physicist Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, has received 350 reports of UFOs in the past two years. 

Almost half, or precisely 171 of those UFO cases, remain unexplained. 

Although their is cross-collaboration, the US space agency’s panel is leading the civilian, unclassified side of this effort, while AARO focuses on examining UAPs in coordination with the intelligence and military communities. 

For its advisory panel, NASA put together an independent team of 16 scientific, aeronautic, and data analytic experts with the aim of analyzing sightings of UAPs from a logical and scientific perspective.

‘We have access to a broad range of observations of Earth from space – and that is the lifeblood of scientific inquiry,’ the space agency’s Thomas Zurbuchen said last year before the study began.

‘We have the tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That’s the very definition of what science is. That’s what we do.’

The NASA panel’s report, which was published at 9:30 ET (14:30) this morning, was followed by a media briefing at NASA’s headquarters in Washington that began at 10:00 ET (15:00), during which the panel discussed its findings.

The press conference was streamed live on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website here. 

‘We recognize that public interest in UAPs is high, and that the demand for answers is strong,’ Dan Evans, the NASA official in charge of the study, said this past May.

‘It is now our collective responsibility to investigate these occurrences with the rigorous scientific scrutiny that they deserve.’

He added: ‘All of NASA’s data is available to the public – we take that obligation seriously – and we make it easily accessible for anyone to see or study.’

• Dogs more likely to find food if they see it being hidden, than on smell alone

By Xantha Leatham Deputy Science Editor For The Daily Mail

Published: 14:00 EDT, 13 September 2023 | Updated: 14:00 EDT, 13 September 2023