A committee of NASAwhich was formed last year to study what the government calls “unidentified aerial phenomena”, commonly described as UFOs, is to hold its first public meeting today, before drawing up a report, which is expected to be released in the coming days weeks.

This 16-member body, which includes experts from fields ranging from physics to astrobiology, was formed last June to review sightings UFOs and other data collected from civilian sectors of government and commerce.

Today’s four-hour public meeting will focus “on final discussions before the agency’s independent research team releases a report this summer,” NASA said in announcing the meeting.

The commission is conducting the first such investigation ever conducted under the auspices of the US space agency into a matter that the administration once restricted to the exclusive and classified purview of military and national security officials.

The NASA study is separate from a new Pentagon investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), which have been documented in recent years by military jet pilots and analyzed by defense and intelligence officials USA.

The parallel efforts of NASA and Pentagon – both conducted with some public scrutiny – mark a U-turn by the government after decades of dismissing reports of unidentified flying object (ATIA, UFO) sightings dating back to the 1940s.

The term UFO, long associated with flying saucers and aliens, has been replaced in government jargon by the term UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).

While NASA’s science mission was seen by some as promising a more open-minded approach to a subject long treated as taboo by the defense establishment, the US space agency made it clear from the start that it was not going to jump to conclusions.

“There is no evidence that UAPs are of extraterrestrial origin,” NASA said in announcing the panel’s formation last June.

In its most recent statements, the agency presented a potential change to the UAP acronym itself, referring to it as an abbreviation of “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” (Anomalous Phenomena of Unknown Identity). This means that sightings other than those that appear to occur on air may be included.

However, in announcing today’s meeting, NASA said it is defining the UAP “as observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or as known natural phenomena from a scientific point of view”.

US defense officials have said the Pentagon’s recent effort to investigate such sightings has resulted in hundreds of new reports being investigated, though most remain unexplained.

The head of the Pentagon’s new agency All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has stated that the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life has not been ruled out, however none of the sightings of unidentified flying objects have provided evidence that they were of extraterrestrial origin.