Acknowledging Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: What’s Next?

A slew of measures in the US have attempted to destigmatise the sighting of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), which may go a long way in unravelling the truth behind their long-standing mystery.

It has been nearly 120 years since the advent of fixed-wing flight. All those who have invented and continuously innovated aircraft have never shied away from showcasing the prowess of their products. They often went beyond the in-your-face demonstrations into the realms of ‘shock and awe.’ Every radical and working aircraft design — the swallow-like German Messerschmitt ME 262, the world’s first commercial jet — the American de Havilland Comet, the French supersonic jet Concorde, the swing-wing Russian strategic bomber Tupolev-22M, the American high-altitude Lockheed SR-71, or the tailless American Northrop B-2 Spirit — stunned the world on their first appearances.

While we ‘humans’ developed these radical designs, murmurs of encountering unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) with extraordinary capabilities were often heard. Unclaimed by any nation or non-national actors made them even more intriguing. Modern science fiction is brimming with all possibilities revolving around these extraordinary objects. The ideological divergence between the witnesses and naysayers, the believers and the sceptics, has endured for decades. The beginning of the Space Age added flair to the divergences. We began sending spacecraft to the Moon, Mars, and other planets in search of astrobiological signatures; we keep scanning the skies through a process known as ‘Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence;’ we’ve sent human-made artefacts on interstellar spacecraft like the Voyager; theorised calculations and equations that measure the possibility of the presence of advanced extraterrestrial intelligence in our stellar and interstellar neighbourhood. These attempts continue to spark science fiction of all kinds — be it movies, novels, podcasts, or artworks. The mainstream scientific pursuits gained honour and legitimacy, and rightly so. Still, honest reporting of encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) was subjected to scepticism, to the point of stigmatisation. Any solitary witness of an extraordinary event carries the burden of proof. The least that can be done is to destigmatise any honest reporting, mainly done by personnel trained to study UAPs. The destigmatisation of UAP reporting has begun, although with some riders.

On a lighter note, many joke worldwide that the UAPs are like immigrants with the American Dream. They are only seen in the United States. But that is not true. The global penetration of US pop culture has strengthened this gag, but UAP reporting has happened worldwide. The US government has occasionally publicly disclosed that it has carried out UAP investigations, perhaps due to keen public interest in the US about UAPs. However, they have not revealed the analyses and conclusions.

On May 17, 2022, the House Intelligence Committee's Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation (C3) Subcommittee held a rare public hearing on UAP. The hearing revealed how the US Navy conducted the Project Blue Book, which tracked and catalogued unexplained UAP sightings and anomalies in US airspace from 1952 to 1969. These sightings were then deemed a national security threat. Hence, the US Department of Defense (DoD) was tasked to investigate them. In December 2017, news of the Defense Intelligence Agency running the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to monitor UAPs from 2007 to 2012 came to the fore. The announcement came from the backdrop of three UAP-indicating videos that were released to the public. These images, known as FLIR, GOFAST, and GIMBAL, were collected by naval aircraft, part of the US Navy’s USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt Aircraft Carrier Strike Group. In August 2020, during a US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence meeting, it became apparent that the US Office of Naval Intelligence is operating an unclassified but unpublicized Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Task Force. More recently, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022 commanded the termination of this Task Force and authorised the establishment of an ‘Office to Address Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ (herewith OAUAP) within the Office of the Secretary of Defense and in coordination with the Director of National Intelligence. These developments demonstrate how UAP studies within the DoD have evolved from a lower-institutional pursuit to a defence secretary-level assignment.

The duties of the OAUAP will be:

1. To develop methods to coordinate and standardise the compilation, reporting, and investigation of UAP incidents across the DoD;
2. To develop processes and methods, ensuring that UAP incidents from all US military departments are reported and included in a centralised repository;
3. Institutionalise practices to make timely and unfailing reporting of UAP incidents;
4. Evaluate ties between UAP incidents and nonstate actors, hostile foreign governments, or other foreign governments;
5. Assess the threat of UAP incidents to their country;
6. Create appropriate coordination mechanisms with other non-defence departments and agencies of the Federal Government, like NASA; and
7. Create appropriate coordination mechanisms with their country’s allies and partners to evaluate UAP’s nature and extent.

The Act also details the scope of the report that the Congressional Committee expects from the Secretary of Defense. The annual reports will be presented every 31st December starting from 2022 to 2026. Furthermore, the Act defines UAP as “airborne objects witnessed by a pilot or aircrew member that are not immediately identifiable.”

An analysis of this US Congress’s definition denotes that UAP detections of only pilots and aircrew members of DoD aircraft will be considered legitimate. The pilots or aircrew could be from the Navy, Air Force, Army, Space Force, or intelligence agencies, followed by agencies and non-defence US government departments. Only pilots and aircrew members will be considered legitimate human intelligence (HUMINT). This trained HUMINT will be substantiated with evidence gathered from geospatial (GEOINT), signals (SIGINT), and measurement and signals intelligence (MASINT) methods.

We'd like to briefly overview why the US makes rapid and publicized progress on UAP investigations. Firstly, we must understand that in 2019, the DoD flagged off the establishment of the US Space Force. The five responsibilities of the US Space Force are:

• Space domain awareness;
• Information warfare;
• Space logistics and mobility;
• Combative power projection in space; and
• Space defense.

Any UAP incident touches upon all these roles. The US may be assessing that UAP interference could impact its non-combative capabilities, such as space logistics and mobility. These capabilities are now shared by both the DoD and private space companies, which are seeking to expand their economic footprint to the Moon. The US would not want to compromise its military- and commercially driven capabilities.

Secondly, the US hints that the UAPs stem from enemy countries and not from extraterrestrial (ET) intelligence through this Act. This insinuation works well for DoD. Any allusion to ET intelligence may subject the entire activity to tremendous scepticism from the US scientific community and innovation ecosystems. This would not augur well for US national security. Many countries, including France, Germany, China, and Russia, have established their respective military space units over the past decade. These units share nearly the same responsibilities as the US Space Force. They could be performing the same duties as the US’s OAUAP. This only elicits greater competition in UAP detection and cataloguing between the US and these countries. However, the DoD still has the edge over others. The blue-water capabilities of the US Navy, the expeditionary capabilities of the US Air Force, and the vast communications, command, control, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) infrastructure of the US Space Force are second to none. Therefore, the US would want a superior understanding of UAP than its allies and adversaries.

A more coordinated detection of UAP, utilising HUMINT, SIGINT, and MASINT, along with GEOINT, is likely to provide more information about the physical characteristics of the UAP. Spectroscopic MASINT measurement of the UAP objects would provide essential details on the material that the UAP craft is made up of. GEOINT, offered by remote sensing satellite constellations, could give deep insights into their flight paths. Until now, UAPs would vanish without any trace. SIGINT provided by space domain awareness systems could be designed to comprehend electronic, radar, and telemetry signatures of the UAP crafts. Countries with capabilities in GEOINT, SIGINT, MASINT, and HUMINT will have better chances of investigating UAPs.

The US is actively engaged in UAP detection, characterisation, and cataloguing. It may realise that its competitors have similar capabilities and may outdo it at information gathering, comprehending information, and predicting threats and opportunities. The US aims to be at the forefront of situational awareness, a practice that is rapidly becoming the foundational block of national security.

Although many are tempted to jump the gun and connect UAP scouting with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, a careful path must be tread. ET intelligence is a collective surmise at this juncture, which may be real or otherwise. Some would also believe those claiming to have witnessed evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. But personal anecdotal pieces of evidence need substantiation with empirical scientific evidence, debiasing, and statistical inference. This has likely not yet happened.

The US has taken a bold step of publicly setting processes for understanding UAPs and destigmatising UAP detections. It is treading a careful path by assuming only pilots and aircrew members as solicited data gatherers and removing the burden of stigma that these individuals were previously subjected to. Many countries may have already initiated these processes in a discreet manner. Many would eventually follow in the US' footsteps. However, one thing is certain: substantiating the presence of ET intelligence in the form of UAPs requires a far greater legal and philosophical burden of proof than verifying that the UAP is of terrestrial origin. No government is technically prepared to lift such a massive burden. The US’s newly established processes are a way of gathering evidence and eliminating scepticism one step at a time. The more the proofs, the better the conclusion.

The original piece was published in the May 2022 edition of Science India.