Mysterious Metallic Orbs Flying ‘All Over the World,' Pentagon Says at NASA UFO Panel

Government officials have spotted mysterious metallic orbs flying all around the world, in addition to many other types of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), according to the first public meeting of NASA’s UAP independent study team, which was held on Wednesday.

Speakers at the meeting emphasized the need to collect more high-quality UAP data and lamented the stigma surrounding this topic, which they said makes it less likely for people to report unidentified phenomena. Indeed, multiple speakers noted that members of NASA’s UAP study team have been subjected to harassment as a result of their work in this field.

“It is really disheartening to hear of the harassment that our panelists have faced online all because they're studying this topic,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for the NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, during the meeting. “NASA stands behind our panelists and we do not tolerate abuse. Harassment only leads to further stigmatization of the UAP field, significantly hindering scientific progress and discouraging others to study this important subject matter.”

NASA’s UAP study team was convened in 2022 with the mission of investigating the origin and nature of UAPs with rigorous scientific standards using mostly unclassified data. NASA and other agencies, such as the Pentagon, use the term UAP instead of the more widely known UFO, which stands for unidentified flying object, in part to expand the scope of these studies beyond the aerial domain to include unexplained phenomena in oceans, space, and on the ground.  

The team is made up of 16 members with a range of backgrounds, including NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, oceanographer Paula Bontempi, and David Spergel, a Princeton astrophysicist who serves as the chair of the study. The livestreamed meeting on Wednesday offered a sneak peek of some of the major findings of the study, which will be released to the public in a full report later this summer.

The meeting included a presentation by Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the US Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), who shared tantalizing reports of unexplained metallic orbs seen at various locations on Earth. 

The presentation followed up on Kirkpatrick’s appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee in April, where he initially described an image of one of these orbs that was taken by a U.S. military MQ-9 Reaper drone during a routine mission in the Middle East in 2022. 

“This is a typical example of the thing that we see most of,” Kirkpatrick said during the Wednesday meeting. “We see these all over the world and we see these making very interesting apparent maneuvers. This one in particular, however, I would point out, demonstrated no enigmatic technical capabilities and was no threat to airborne safety.”

“While we are still looking at it, I don't have any more data other than that,” Kirkpatrick added. “Being able to come to some conclusion is going to take time, until we can get better resolved data on similar objects that we can then do a larger analysis on.”

Kirkpatrick also shared newly-released footage of UAPs spotted during an aircraft training mission in the Western United States that have been provisionally identified as commercial aircraft. He noted that AARO receives an average of 50 to 100 reports of UAPs per month, though sometimes that sightings spikes due to weird events, like the Chinese balloon incident in February or Starlink launches. Only about 2 to 5 percent of reported UAP sightings turn out to be “really anomalous,” Kirkpatrick said.

“The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO and in our holdings demonstrate mundane characteristics of readily explainable sources,” Kirkpatrick explained. “While a large number of cases in AARO’s holdings remain technically unresolved, this is primarily due to a lack of data associated with those cases.”

“Meanwhile, for the few objects that do demonstrate potentially anomalous characteristics, AARO is approaching these cases with the highest level of objectivity and analytical rigor,” he continued. “AARO has shared these cases with the appropriately cleared NASA team members in order to discuss and help recommend potential scientific areas of study that NASA may want to take lead on.”

To that point, many speakers at the meeting addressed the dire lack of high-quality data on UAPs, which has scuttled attempts to explain some of the most ambiguous sightings. The study team will include recommendations for collecting better data and building more efficient information-sharing systems in their report, which could help to finally solve many of the most perplexing UAP sightings—though at least some of the truth will likely remain out there.

“The current existing data and eyewitness reports alone are insufficient to provide conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of every UAP event,” said study chair David Spergel during the meeting. “They're often uninformative due to lack of quality control and data curation. To understand UAP better, targeted data collection, thorough data curation, and robust analyses are needed. Such an approach will help to discern unexplained UAP sightings, but even then there's no guarantee that all sightings will be explained.”