What did we learn from NASA’s first ever public meeting on UFOs?

Published

2 years ago

May 31, 2023

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NASA has held its first public meeting on UFOs, a year after launching a study into unexplained sightings.

The space agency televised the four-hour-long hearing on Wednesday, featuring an independent panel of experts at NASA headquarters in Washington, with the public taking part remotely.

The team included 16 scientists and other experts selected by NASA including retired astronaut Scott Kelly, the first American to spend nearly a year in space.

As it happened: Experts trolled online during UFO sightings meeting

The group looked at what unclassified information is available on the subject and how much more is needed to understand what’s going on in the sky, according to panel chair David Spergel.

No secret military data, such as anything surrounding the suspected spy balloons from China spotted flying over the US earlier this year, was included.

However the panel said they had seen a spike in reported sightings since then, with the US Department of Defence’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office – which is also investigating separately to NASA – receiving around 800 sightings so far, but only a tiny fraction of those contain signals which could be deemed “anomalous”.

During the meeting the experts were quizzed on a range of topics including why they have taken to calling them UAPs rather than UFOs and what NASA would do if they actually discovered extra-terrestrials.

Dr Daniel Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research, said that they don’t use the term UFO (unidentified flying object) any more due to the stigma attached to the term.

He said that they had instead opted to use the term unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) because the topic is a “serious business”.

On what they would do if they were to actually discover extra-terrestrial life, astrobiologist Dr David Grinspoon said NASA would be “highly driven” to share evidence.

He referred to an example from 1996, when NASA scientists believed they had spotted possible signs of life from Mars in a meteorite.

It sparked a huge presidential news conference involving the space agency, and “that’s what would happen” if a similar event were to happen during this study, he said.

“If we discovered something, we would try to make sure we were right and then we’d loudly and proudly let the public know about it.”

With a view to making that discovery, Dr Spergel said NASA was “searching for life in any form”.

“The search for life is a really important thing. We haven’t found life beyond Earth yet,” he said. “But we are looking.”

However, putting a dampener on hopes we were close to first contact, Dr Evans said firmly: “I want to emphasise this loud and proud: There is absolutely no convincing evidence for extra-terrestrial life associated with unidentified objects.”

He went on to lament that several committee members had been subjected to “online abuse” for serving on the team, which detracts from the scientific process.

He said that NASA security is dealing with it.

“It’s precisely this rigorous, evidence-based approach that allows one to separate the fact from fiction,” Dr Evans said.

A final report is expected by the end of July and will be followed by a meeting to discuss its findings.

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Nicholas Rossi: US man who fled to Scotland to avoid rape charges jailed

Published

3 hours ago

October 20, 2025

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Nicholas Rossi: US man who fled to Scotland to avoid rape charges jailed

Nicholas Rossi, an American man who faked his death and fled to Scotland to escape rape charges, has been jailed for at least five years.

The sentence handed down to the 38-year-old is the first of two he faces after being convicted separately in August and September of raping two women in 2008.

Utah has “indeterminate sentencing” – meaning jail terms handed down are in a range of years rather than a fixed number, with release dates set by the state’s parole board.

During August’s three-day trial, Rossi’s accuser and her parents took the stand – with the victim telling the court that he left a “trail of fear, pain, and destruction” behind him.

“This is not a plea for vengeance. This is a plea for safety and accountability, for recognition of the damage that will never fully heal,” she said.

Brandon Simmons, a prosecutor in the case, alleged Rossi “uses rape to control women” and posed a risk to community safety.

Rossi – whose legal name is Nicholas Alahverdian – maintained his innocence during the sentencing hearing. In a soft, raspy voice, he said: “I am not guilty of this. These women are lying.”

He was first identified in 2018 after a decade-old DNA rape kit was examined.

How Rossi was caught

But in February 2020 – months after he was charged in one of the cases – an online obituary claimed he had died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Rossi was arrested in Scotland the following year while being treated for COVID, after hospital staff recognised his distinctive tattoos – including the crest of a university he never attended.

A protracted court battle meant he wasn’t extradited until January 2024, with Rossi claiming he was an Irish orphan named Arthur Knight who was being framed.

Investigators identified at least a dozen aliases that he had used to evade capture over the years.

One of his victims had been recovering from a traumatic brain injury when she responded to a personal advert that Rossi had posted on Craigslist.

They began dating and were engaged within a couple of weeks – and according to her testimony, Rossi had asked her to pay for dates and car repairs, lend him money, and take on debt for their rings.

She told the court that Rossi raped her in his bedroom one night after she drove him home – and went to police years later after discovering that another woman in Utah had come forward with accusations.

Rossi is due to be sentenced for the second conviction in November.

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‘Ukraine can’t win war,’ says Trump – as reports emerge of another tumultuous meeting with Zelenskyy

Published

3 hours ago

October 20, 2025

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'Ukraine can't win war,' says Trump - as reports emerge of another tumultuous meeting with Zelenskyy

Donald Trump has said he doesn’t think Ukraine can win the war against Russia – as reports emerge of a less-than-harmonious meeting between the US president and Volodymyr Zelenskyy .

Asked about the conflict by a journalist during a visit to the White House by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the Mr Trump responded bluntly: “I don’t think they will,” before adding: “They could still win it, I never said they would win it… War is a very strange thing, a lot of bad things happen.”

It is a marked change from his comments a few weeks ago at a UN gathering in New York where he said Ukraine could retake “all of its territory”.

And it comes after the Financial Times claimed the behind-the-scenes of Mr Trump and President Zelenskyy’s meeting in Washington on Friday had descended into a “shouting match”.

According to the paper, the US president repeatedly told his Ukrainian counterpart to accept Vladimir Putin‘s terms for ending the war – warning him that the Russian leader would “destroy” Ukraine if it did not agree.

Mr Zelenskyy later attempted to pour water over the suggestions, saying their meeting was “positive” and that Ukraine was preparing a contract to buy 25 Patriot air defence systems as a result of their talks.

However, Mr Zelenskyy said he did not secure the Tomahawk missiles he had wanted for Ukraine. The long-range missiles would have been a major boost for Kyiv.

“In my opinion, he does not want an escalation with the Russians until he meets with them,” Mr Zelenskyy said.

Meanwhile, Hungary’s foreign minister Peter Szijarto has announced he will visit Washington on Tuesday. It follows claims from Mr Trump that he would meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest soon.

And on Monday, US secretary of state Marco Rubio had a phone call with Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.

According to the state department, Mr Rubio and Mr Lavrov spoke about possible concrete steps to implement understandings reached during the call between Mr Trump and Mr Putin last week.

Mr Rubio had, a statement said, also “emphasised the importance of upcoming engagements as an opportunity for Moscow and Washington to collaborate on advancing a durable resolution of the Russia-Ukraine war, in line with President Trump’s vision”.

Also on Monday, French president Emmanuel Macron announced there will be a meeting of the coalition of the willing in London on Friday which Mr Zelenskyy will attend.

The coalition – co-chaired by Sir Keir Starmer, Mr Macron and Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz – has the aim of bringing countries together to protect a peace deal in Ukraine.

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What’s affected by internet outage – all we know so far

Published

16 hours ago

October 20, 2025

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What's affected by internet outage - all we know so far

Dozens of websites, banks and apps are being affected by a major internet outage.

The problem, which started on Monday morning, appears to be related to an issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

As of 9.20am, there were more than 2,000 reports of the Amazon Web Services outage in the US alone, according to Downdetector, which monitors issues and outages in real-time.

Follow live updates here

On its service status page, the company said it was seeing “increased error rates” and delays with “multiple AWS services”.

Here’s what we know so far.

What has been affected?

Multiple banks, the HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) website, mobile phone networks and video-chatting platform Zoom are among the websites having technical issues.

All Amazon products – including Prime Video and Amazon Music – have also been affected, as well as the main Amazon website.

Here’s a full list of what has been affected by the internet outage, according to Downdetector:

• Snapchat
• Ring
• Roblox
• Amazon Web Services
• Life360
• My Fitness Pal
• Amazon
• Xero
• Signal
• Canva
• Fortnite
• Blink Security
• Zoom
• HMRC
• Clash Royale
• Clash Of Clans
• Asana
• Wordle
• Slack
• Smartsheet
• Epic Games Store
• Duolingo
• Amazon Alexa
• Jira
• Vodafone
• Tidal
• Coinbase
• Atlassian
• IMDB
• Amazon Prime Video
• Pokemon Go
• BT
• Peloton
• EE
• Ancestry
• Square
• Playstation Network
• Eventbrite
• Amazon Music
• Sky
• Flickr
• Hay Day
• Rocket League
• Perplexity AI
• Dead By Daylight
• Bank Of Scotland
• Lloyds Bank
• Halifax

What has AWS said?

AWS confirmed it was suffering from “increased error rates and latencies” for multiple services.

What is Amazon Web Services?

Mickey Carroll

Science and technology reporter

Amazon Web Services was named as the cause of the problem by the chief executive of AI company Perplexity.

Aravind Srinivas posted on X saying: “Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”

AWS describes itself as “the world’s most comprehensive” cloud service.

It offers companies a virtual backbone, giving them access to servers, databases and storage without having to build their own infrastructure.

Millions of businesses are thought to use AWS, so when something goes wrong, it can have a huge impact. AWS hasn’t put out any information on the outage. Sky News has contacted the company for comment.

In a statement on its website, the company said: “We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause,” an update on its website says.

“We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share.”

The company is posting regular updates on the situation and said its engineers were “immediately engaged” as soon as they spotted the issue.

Concentrated in the US

ThousandEyes, a website that tracks the performance of local and wide area networks, servers and applications, shows many of the outages appear to be concentrated in the US.

A large portion is focused in Virginia, which is widely considered as the global capital for data centres.

Has something like this happened before?