NASA Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Independent Study Team Report/Work Products: Discussion
WORK PRODUCTS: DISCUSSION
The panel's responses to the eight charge elements in the Terms of Reference, as well as the panel's overall recommendations and conclusions, all stemmed from a series of sub-panel reports that the entire team deliberated in full at the public meeting held on May 31, 2023. The reports are included in this section for full public transparency.
UAP in a Scientific Context
On June 9, 2022, NASA announced an independent study of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), with a focus on identifying how the Agency could address the question scientifically. Recently, many credible witnesses, often military aviators, have reported seeing objects they did not recognize over U.S. airspace. Most of these events have since been explained, but a small handful cannot be immediately identified as known humanmade or natural phenomena. These events are now collectively referred to as UAP. But are these objects real or are they sensor artifacts? Are they a threat to aerospace safety? Are they a threat to U.S. national security? Are they unknown natural phenomena? What else could they be?
This report outlines several approaches NASA could take if the Agency chooses to address the question of UAP.
A vital part of NASA's mission is to explore the unknown. Often, the most exciting aspect of exploration is discovering unexplained phenomena. After discovery, the next step in charting the unknown requires applying rigorous scientific approaches to understand an observation. This means scrutinizing our assumptions and intuition; transparently and diligently collecting data; reproducing results; seeking independent evaluation; and finally, reaching a scientific consensus about the nature of an occurrence. It was Thomas Jefferson who, in an 1808 letter, wrote: "A thousand phenomena present themselves daily which we cannot explain, but where facts are suggested, bearing no analogy with the laws of nature as yet known to us, their verity needs proofs proportioned to their difficulty."
Today, we summarize Jefferson's conclusion as "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." This is especially true when it comes to claims that could profoundly change how we view our place in the cosmos. Over millennia, we've developed ever more powerful instruments to study the universe and each time we've looked at the sky—or our planet—in a different way, we've observed surprising and perplexing phenomena that at first defied explanation.
For example, in 1967, astrophysics graduate student Jocelyn Bell-Burnell discovered a pulsing cosmic radio source. Its pulses were so regular—just like a ticking clock—that it at first seemed artificial in origin. But she eventually discovered that her confoundingly periodic cosmic object was a rapidly rotating neutron star: a pulsar. Today, scientists know of thousands of pulsars, and they can harness their clock-like rotation to probe everything from nuclear physics to gravitational waves produced by colliding supermassive black holes. In the 1960s, satellites also detected mysterious gamma-ray bursts. These initially looked like evidence for covert Cold War-era nuclear tests. Now, astronomers know that these tremendously energetic explosions are caused when massive stars cataclysmically collapse and die, and when stellar corpses violently collide.
Science has also solved mysteries that originated much closer to home, including the mechanisms behind bioluminescence and glittering atmospheric "sprites"—beautiful orange-red flashes of light that were reported for more than a hundred years but only scientifically explained recently. The crucial steps in understanding these events were the systematic collection of data, the rigorous testing of hypotheses, the development of new observational techniques to study unknowns, and an open and transparent scientific discussion.
The scientific method challenges us to solve problems by stringently evaluating our own ideas, by being willing to be wrong, and by following the data into unknown territory—wherever it may lead us. As Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, "science carries us toward an understanding of how the world is, rather than how we would wish it to be."
Science is a process that reveals reality rather than sculpts it—no matter how unsatisfying or confusing that reality might be.
That includes the question of whether UAP have an extraterrestrial origin. There is an intellectual continuum between hypothesizing that faraway extraterrestrial civilizations might produce detectable technologies, and looking for those technologies closer to home. But in the search for life beyond Earth, extraterrestrial life itself must be the hypothesis of last resort—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."
To date, in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, there is no conclusive evidence suggesting an extraterrestrial origin for UAP. When it comes to UAP, the challenge we have is that the data needed to explain these anomalous sightings often do not exist; this includes eyewitness reports, which on their own can be interesting and compelling, but aren't reproducible and usually lack the information needed to make any definitive conclusions about a phenomenon's provenance.
This report offers a vision of how NASA could contribute to understanding the phenomena and how the agency's approach might complement efforts by other federal entities. Congress has made the Department of Defense's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) the lead Federal organization for resolving these anomalies. With its emphasis on open scientific inquiry, NASA can complement AARO's work.
The following sections highlight the information provided to the panel, and our conclusions, over seven months of fact-finding.
What is NASA's Role?
NASA is a science-driven agency committed to exploring and understanding air and space. That mission includes tackling unknown phenomena, whether in the farthest reaches of the universe or closer to home, as well as here on Earth. For more than 60 years, the Agency has focused on astronomy, astrophysics and aeronautics; it also uses space-based assets to study our home world's aquatic, atmospheric, cryospheric, and terrestrial systems.
As a result of NASA's long and storied history of space (and space-based) research, the Agency has amassed a robust and rigorous scientific arsenal for investigating unexplained observations, which will be crucial for studying UAP. The Agency has a variety of existing and planned assets—plus a trove of historic and current data sets—that could be used to address the challenges of detecting and/or understanding UAP. NASA research also employs a wide range of observation and analytical methods, using calibrated sensors, advanced data analysis, modeling, and cutting-edge computational and data visualization tools. As such, NASA's missions, data, and technical expertise in science and engineering could help to investigate and understand reported UAP.
The panel considered how existing and/or planned NASA missions, data, experience, or studies might contribute to the understanding of UAP using global satellite and suborbital observations. Chiefly, NASA's scientific discoveries, results, and databases are public. Already, an extensive data archive from NASA satellites and foreign partner space agencies is openly available, ensuring transparency as well as the opportunity for citizen scientist participation.
In Earth science, NASA's core mission is to understand and protect our home planet. Passive radiometric Earth-observing missions, such as NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites, currently employ a range of sensors that collect information about Earth's land, ocean, atmosphere, and other components. These data sets could help to identify weather, ocean, and other environmental characteristics coincident with UAP observations. New Earth-observing missions, such as NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar), a partnership with the Indian Space Research Organization, will provide valuable radar data that could be helpful for examining UAP directly, in addition to their environmental context.
These newer observations live within a historical context. For more than 50 years, global time series data gathered by NASA (with partners including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA]) have allowed researchers to examine trends within and across components of Earth's systems. Such long-term data sets help scientists better understand the evolving Earth, while also identifying natural and anthropogenic variability in the Earth system. Knowing that baseline allows researchers to detect and examine Earth's environment for anomalies. Examples of naturally occurring anomalies include events such as harmful algal blooms, hurricanes and typhoons, changes in the jet stream, drought and fire conditions, and bioluminescence in the ocean. Understanding the origins of such large-scale phenomena is at the heart of NASA's Earth science mission.
NASA has a long and successful record of partnering with other Federal agencies. In the study of UAP, the establishment of a NASA/AARO liaison will be an important step towards enabling interagency cooperation.
In addition to the Agency's Earth science research programs, NASA also supports programs in astrobiology. Some of these programs investigate life in extreme environments on Earth—with the hypothesis that such organisms and conditions could be analogs for habitable environments elsewhere in the universe. Other programs investigate the possibility that extraterrestrial life exists.
In astrophysics and space sciences, NASA is focused on understanding the universe. Looking for anomalies in both air and space will likely lead to novel discoveries; some might reveal entirely new physics, while others will be interesting and important even if their explanations lie in conventional physics. In time-domain astrophysics, researchers are increasingly interested in identifying unusual, transient events. At radio wavelengths, this includes the recent discovery of fast radio bursts, which astronomers are still struggling to understand. Recently, most innovation has been accomplished by combining information from multiple observatories that operate at different electromagnetic wavelengths, from radio and optical telescopes on the ground to ultraviolet and gamma-ray telescopes in space, and even with different messengers: neutrinos and gravitational waves. Observatories with extensive sky coverage and dense time coverage are ideal for spotting near-Earth objects with large proper motions and phenomena with anomalous time evolution. For example, the NASA Planetary Defense Coordination program is dedicated to leveraging NASA and partner astrophysical research assets to identify and classify near-Earth objects—such as asteroids—that move rapidly across the sky.
In addition to its extensive Federal and international partnerships, NASA is also uniquely capable of leveraging public and private partnerships—for example, working with commercial partners in Earth-observing satellite data. These collaborations could result in new technologies that may be useful in observing and understanding UAP. Partners, including other Federal agencies such as NOAA and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), may collect data that could help to understand UAP. Moreover, NASA has a strong record of international collaboration, which could be beneficial, as the study of these phenomena would benefit from global cooperation and data sharing. Given NASA's experience with long-term scientific projects and missions, the Agency is well equipped to handle the extensive and ongoing study that UAP investigation likely requires.
Many scientists and aviators consider the study of UAP to be "fringe" at best. The panel heard a first-hand account of the type of stigma that may come from reporting UAP, which almost certainly leads to attrition in reporting.
Recently, the DoD began encouraging military aviators to disclose anomalies they encountered, which resulted in a significant increase in UAP reports: Between March 5, 2021, and August 30, 2022, DoD received a total of 247 new UAP reports, according to an analysis published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in 2022. In contrast, 263 reports had been filed in the 17 years prior to March 2021. Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick reported at this panel's public meeting that AARO has now collected more than 800 reported events. This includes the addition of data from the FAA. AARO and ODNI assess that the observed increase in the reporting rate is partially due to a better understanding of the possible threats that UAP may represent—either as flight safety hazards or as potential adversary collection platforms. This is partially due to reduced stigma surrounding UAP reporting.
The negative stigma that impacts reporting rates in turn impacts the study of UAP. In testimony before the Senate Commerce, Science and Technology Committee on February 15, 2023, the Acting FAA Administrator was asked about the process for civilian reporting of balloons. The Administrator, who is also a pilot, indicated that the protocols and reporting of balloons may be spotty. Thus, even as such reports are being encouraged, there are still barriers to reporting observations. For example, how or where should someone make a report? Will the reporter be believed or shamed? Will any action be taken to understand the event?
NASA could play an important role in destigmatizing the UAP reporting process. NASA's long-standing public trust, which is essential for communicating findings about these phenomena to the public, is also crucial for destigmatizing UAP reporting. The scientific processes used by NASA encourage critical thinking and skepticism; within this framework, there should be no credulous acceptance of unlikely reports with unlikely explanations. NASA can model for the public how to approach a topic, such as UAP, by applying transparent reporting and rigorous analyses.
Further, the NASA brand is trusted, global, and positive, representing science, curiosity, and technological achievement in the face of adversity. NASA serves as an example of professionalism and leadership in technological advancement. The NASA logo is enough to generate interest and credibility; studies of things that were previously fringe moved into the mainstream when NASA became involved. Prominent examples of NASA's involvement in public life include slogans like "NASA is with you when you fly," which promote aviation safety. In turn, every U.S. commercial aircraft and every U.S. air traffic control tower has NASA-supported technology on board.
NASA's public announcement of its UAP Independent Study Team membership was met with interest and spurred both positive and negative feedback. At least one scientist serving on the study team reported receiving negative (hate) mail from colleagues due to their membership. Others were ridiculed and criticized on social media. Study Team members also noted firsthand knowledge of colleagues who were warned to stay away from research in areas like extraterrestrial technosignatures, which could damage their scientific credibility and promotion potential. These experiences further confirm the negative stigma associated with studying unusual or unexplained phenomena. Such criticism, either by detractors or by proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, are anathema to the scientific method, which NASA always has and will continue to promote in an objective and open-minded fashion.
As a Federal agency, NASA can make it safer for researchers to explore data within the civilian aerospace domain by starting that work within the Agency itself. NASA can look at how civil data is shared, study how reporting can be incentivized, and help to engage the community. For example, NASA can rally the civil space community through requests for information, by convening conferences, by offering grand challenges, and other activities.
Many Federal, state, local, private, and other domestic and international partners collect data and observations that could be relevant for understanding UAP. As an example, NASA's potential to study the universe is enhanced through partnerships with other agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DoE), which are currently building facilities such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory that will generate data that may be useful for understanding UAP in space. NASA's ability to study Earth is enhanced through partnerships with NSF, which supports Antarctic research. The Antarctic is a superb environment for collecting meteorites. With its low level of human activity, it is a low "clutter" environment for identifying anomalies. Such sparsely occupied airspaces may offer a low background environment for UAP searches; however, it is unclear as to whether or not constraining the search geographically would exclude their presence, or whether environmental phenomena could also be a significant, location-dependent source of noise.
The Federal partnership between AARO and NASA already provides a foundation for a collaborative examination of UAP events. In addition, NASA and AARO should engage other agencies, as appropriate and as needed.
A well-known UAP event is the "GoFast" video, recorded by navy aviators from the USS Theodore Roosevelt. A still frame from this video is shown in the Figure below, where the infrared camera has locked onto a small object in the center. The video gives an impression of an object skimming above the ocean at a great velocity. But analysis of the numerical information on the display reveals a less extraordinary interpretation.
The circled numbers in the image provide the information needed to estimate the object's altitude and velocity. This information includes (1) elevation angle of the camera (negative downward), (2) azimuth angle of the camera, (3) target range in nautical miles, (4) the aircraft's altitude in feet, (5) time reference in seconds, and (6) indicated air speed in knots. Using items 1, 3, and 4, plus a bit of trigonometry, we calculate that the object is at an altitude of 13,000 feet, and 4.2 miles from the ocean behind it (see middle panel). Given that the aircraft's groundspeed is about 435 mph, we may conclude that the impression of rapid motion is at least partly due to the high velocity of the sensor, coupled with the parallax effect.
We can use other information from the display to place some limits on the true velocity of the object. This analysis is summarized in the right-hand panel, which depicts an overhead view of the encounter during a 22-second interval. The jet was banking left at about 15° during this time, which corresponds to an approximate turning radius of 16 kilometers. We know the range and bearing of the object at the start (t0s) and end (t22s) times. Using the calculated true air speed (TAS) and a bit more trigonometry, we find the object moved about 390 meters during this 22-second interval, which corresponds to an average speed of 40 mph. This is a typical wind speed at 13,000 feet.
Our calculation has neglected wind effects on the aircraft, and thus there is uncertainty in this result. But the analysis reveals that the object need not be moving at an extraordinary velocity. Note also that the object appears bright against a dark ocean for these display settings. This indicates that the object is colder than the ocean. There is thus no evidence of heat produced by a propulsion system. This further supports the conjecture that the object is most likely drifting with the wind. The availability of additional data would enable a more firm conclusion about the nature of this object.
Original GoFast video, released by the Department of Defense:
https://www.navair.navy.mil/foia/documents
U.S. Federal agencies that could support the effort to understand UAP include the DoD, Department of State, the FAA, the Department of Commerce (DoC) and major agencies within DoC including NOAA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, plus the DoE and NSF.
Data on UAP
Status of Existing Data
NASA collects an enormous amount of data using highly-calibrated, validated equipment from a variety of environments and domains across the entire Earth. Could NASA bring this same approach of rigorous science to UAP?
Before we can apply the scientific method to understanding an unusual phenomenon, the relevant data must first meet standards for data-driven approaches. Many such standards have been codified over time, including the FAIR data principle—an acronym for Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability[1]. We followed these and other similar principles when reviewing the current status of data on UAP, and that analysis led to the findings and recommendations in this report.
UAP data are rarely, if ever, collected in a concerted effort to understand the phenomenon; they are usually coincidental observations. Often, observations of UAP are made using instruments or sensors that have not been designed or calibrated to detect anomalous objects, and to constrain their movement parameters. Metadata (meaning sensor type, manufacturer, noise characteristics, time of acquisition, instrument sensitivity, information about the data storage such as bit-depth, location of the sensor, conditions of the sensor such as temperature, exposure characteristics, and so on) are often absent, making calibration and a thorough understanding of context difficult. So, there is correspondingly limited information associated with many of the unresolved UAP reports—even if several reports are accompanied by photographic or videographic evidence.
As a result, existing observations are neither optimized for studying UAP nor are they suited for a systematic scientific analysis.
In addition, much of the data collected by military sensors or intelligence satellites are classified—often because of what the imagery could reveal about U.S. technical capabilities to our adversaries, and not because of what is actually in the images. While essential for security, these classified observations enhance the sense of mystery and conspiracy surrounding UAP, and they present an obstacle to scientific inquiry.
For many events, the data and metadata did not enable a conclusive characterization of the size, motion, or nature of the UAP. Yet, where it did, such as in the "GoFast" UAP video, the apparent anomalous behavior of the UAP can often be explained by the motion of the sensor platform[2].
In contrast, NASA observations are made using well-calibrated instruments that have been designed for their specific use cases. This is how NASA can scientifically approach the study of Earth- and space-based phenomena.
In science, data need to be reproducible, and hypotheses falsifiable—the scientific method works by systematically analyzing data with the intent to falsify a hypothesis.
As a general principle, the data should support measurement that can rule out specific explanations or interpretations, leaving us with no choice but to embrace its opposite. In the case of UAP, the hypothesis we seek to reject (or "null hypothesis") is that the UAP have phenomenology consistent with known natural or technological causes. Eyewitness reports should be considered along with corroborating sensor data in the study of UAP as reports may reveal patterns (for example, clusters in time or location). Yet, without calibrated sensor data to accompany it, no report can provide conclusive evidence on the nature of UAP or enable a study into the details of what was witnessed. While witnesses may be inherently credible, reports are not repeatable by others, and they do not allow a complete investigation into possible cognitive biases and errors (such as accuracy in perception, or misperception caused by environmental factors, errors in the recording device, judgment or misjudgment of distance or speed, for example). Therefore, the reports do not alone constitute data that can support a repeatable, reproducible analysis, and the hypothesis that what was witnessed was a manifestation of known natural or technological phenomena cannot be falsified.
Collecting New Data
The instrumental characteristics of the equipment that can potentially capture UAP data are important information that should be available for researchers studying the observations. This is essential for a data- driven study of UAP.
These characteristics may include lab-measured (rather than field-reported) error rates of sensors that are routinely used by both civilian and military aircraft; modeling of optical "ghosting" in the images due to scattering of solar and lunar glints within the camera system; solar or bright star glints from oceans' surfaces; and noise sources intrinsic to the sensors themselves.
Multisensor platforms are important for providing a complete picture of a UAP event. An object's motion should be recorded, as well as its shape (imaging data), color (multispectra or hyperspectral data) and any sounds and other characteristics. Crowd-sourced observations that are standardized can also offer important metadata information that can be used to filter and classify events.
The panel sees an advantage to augmenting potential data collection efforts using modern crowd-sourcing techniques, including open-source smartphone-based apps. Using open-source software is consistent with NASA's commitment to transparency. From multiple near-simultaneous observations with smartphones, imaging and sound data could be collated, and metadata used to triangulate an object's location and estimate its velocity and size.
Such a database could be developed through a partnership involving AARO, NASA, and commercial partners. The collected data would need to meet the standards described above, so platform developers would need to focus on constructing a data architecture that would support such collection. NASA can use its experience in citizen science projects to help minimize data noise, systematic errors, and cognitive biases related to human observed events (as opposed to sensors).
Once an anomalous signal is identified, new discovery infrastructure may be needed to characterize it in full. Collecting additional data on a rapidly evolving phenomenon of interest has become a common practice in astrophysics, but collection of what in astrophysics is referred to as "follow-up data" requires a high level of automation in the collection, reduction, (real time) analysis of the discovery data, and robotization of follow-up facilities. While NASA has historically paved the way for this mode of observing by developing and supporting the General Coordinates Network (GCN) that enables rapid coordination of observations from ground and space assets, consideration of developing such an infrastructure should follow after careful planning of the discovery data as outlined above as such a plan is significantly resource-intensive. If systematic studies of these events continue to reveal anomalies, then future studies may consider optimizing such a system of follow-up observations.
Data Curation and Integration
There is no standardized Federal system for making civilian UAP reports. While the DoD is establishing a systematic mechanism for military UAP reports, current FAA guidelines instruct persons wanting to report UAP to contact local law enforcement or a non-governmental organization such as the National UFO Reporting Center[3]. This results in inhomogeneously collected, processed, and curated data.
Integrating NASA's open, civilian dataset with DoD's more focused, restricted information would take some effort. Additionally, data integration opportunities exist with NOAA. Assets such as the NEXRAD Doppler radar network (160 weather radars jointly operated by the FAA, U.S. Air Force, and National Weather Service) or the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites may be very useful for distinguishing interesting objects from airborne (windborne) clutter.
Commercial remote sensing systems could be another source of high-quality UAP-relevant data, as high-resolution, high-cadence imagery captured by dense satellite constellations could resolve UAP events. For instance, commercial constellations provide daily (or more frequent) cadence imagery, at sub- to several- meter spatial resolution. However, integrating anomalous events across platforms, including radar data and commercial downward looking satellites, is an expensive exercise.
In addition to integration, data curation is also an important part of the scientific approach. Currently, studying even a single UAP event requires a heavy lift in retrieving data (and metadata, when available), which at the moment is entirely manual. It cannot be automated due to the poor organization and curation of the data. Organized data repositories are needed to facilitate automation in retrieving UAP data—and therefore, to facilitate the systematic, scientific approach to studying UAP. NASA's extensive experience in data calibration, cleaning, curation, management, and distribution, and its practice of making all of its data accessible to the public, could be leveraged to set up curated data repositories for the study of UAP. These repositories could include data from NASA assets that are suitable for the study of UAP, as well as crowd-sourced data from NASA-related platforms.
Curated public repositories of UAP data would facilitate data mining (or knowledge discovery from data) by scientists and citizen scientists. Several platforms built for analyzing scientific data have led to historical scientific discoveries. For example, the Galaxy Zoo, a platform that collects astrophysical data and enables citizen-scientist projects, led to the discovery of Boyajian's Star—a star with unique and peculiar fluctuations in brightness that at one point was considered a potential signature of alien technology. Years later, the star's behavior was understood to be the work of a disk of disrupted comets.
A strategy that encourages citizen analysis of UAP data would bring an element of transparency to the field that could help combat biases, preconceived skepticism, and mistrust of authorities. Opening the analysis to a large audience would also improve robustness: Multiple competing but independent teams, working on solving science's biggest questions, provide an additional layer of verification. As an example, the unexpected finding that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate (because of the mysterious force that we now call "dark energy") is a good example of how that might work. In the 1990s, two independent teams simultaneously found evidence for the accelerating cosmos using data that had been collected and analyzed independently.
Analyzing UAP Data
When searching for a signal in data, scientists often have to separate and extract it from a complex background of signals produced by unrelated phenomena—commonly referred to as simply "background," noise, or clutter. Therefore, when looking for rare and unusual events, a common strategy is to search where there is little background noise. For example, neutrino experiments are often conducted underground (e.g. the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, IceCUBE in Antarctica); most particles cannot reach those depths because they are absorbed by the Earth. Meteorite hunters are often most successful in Antarctica—any rock found on top of a glacier is an interesting object.
In contrast, the airspace near military sites is a challenging place to search for UAP: human aircrafts, drones, balloons, and other objects, are all significant sources of background.
Geographically, sparsely occupied airspaces—such above the South Pole—may offer a low background environment for UAP searches. But UAP are poorly understood, and it's not clear whether limiting the search geographically would exclude their presence, or whether environmental phenomena could also be a significant, location-dependent source of noise. Another background-limiting strategy would be to examine astronomical plates for satellites prior to 1959, when Sputnik, the first artificial satellite of Earth[4] launched. (Although, if something unusual were to be found in historical astronomical plates, it would be difficult to verify its nature with additional data, as historical records may be incomplete, lost, intractable, not reproducible, and at best laborious to cross-reference.)
Fortunately, modern analytical techniques have improved our ability to find extremely rare signals within a sea of clutter, whether that is one Higgs event in 1010 collisions with the Large Hadron Collider, or a small number of photons from an exoplanet hiding in a billion stellar background photons. If the background cannot be minimized, it has to be characterized in detail and completely; detailed knowledge of the signatures (morphological, spectroscopic, kinematic) of all known airborne events need to be incorporated to eliminate spurious detections of known phenomena. This requires an extensive study of known events with accurately calibrated instruments.
There are numerous balloons and drones in the air at any moment. Observers may report some of these conventional objects as anomalies. The DoD already has the responsibility of alert response to unexplained aircraft in U.S. airspace. NASA could be a partner in the search for aerospatial events by enabling cross-identification with anomalies in the Earth-space environment. Since NASA data are already public and offered to the world in well-curated repositories accessible programmatically, the Agency's portfolio is set up to enable cross-referencing with NASA data and contribute to this characterization.
A database that supports the characterization of background signals should include information about the launch rate of balloons (weather, scientific, commercial, hobbyist, and military—where allowed by national security considerations); number of aircraft in the sky across the United States and the globe; daily drone launch rate within U.S. airspace; as well as characteristics of the appearance and motion capabilities of these items.
There are two approaches to detecting anomalies in large datasets. If you are looking for a needle in a haystack, one approach is to have a detailed model of the properties of needles and look for anything that looks like a needle. The other approach is to have an accurate model of the properties of hay and look for anything that looks different from hay.
In the first approach, if one knows the signal to expect, a model (or simulations) can be developed to look for that signal in large datasets. While we may be able to anticipate the sorts of signals produced by physical systems that adhere to known laws of physics, we cannot comprehensively envision all possible signals that could explain UAP, or that come from new technology or new physics (were it adversarial, extraterrestrial, or a naturally occurring but as-of-yet unknown phenomena).
The alternative approach to detecting anomalies requires a deep and thorough knowledge of what is normal and known, which can subsequently be separated from what is anomalous and unknown.
Machine learning has emerged as a powerful tool for the search for rare events, such as the creation of a Higgs Boson at an accelerator, the detection of rare cancer types, or the detection of fraudulent credit card charges to intrusions in cyber infrastructure. Machine learning and AI can play a role in the study of UAP, but not until the data both meet the standards described above and enable an extensive characterization of known and anomalous signals.
A recommendation about which methodologies specifically should be applied to this problem cannot be given at this time, as that selection depends on the nature of the data to be analyzed. Thus this question should be asked after (or ideally together with) the questions pertaining to UAP observing platforms and curated repositories for UAP data. Once the nature of the data is established, selecting algorithms for their analysis can be completed.
However, in the broad and lively domain of anomaly detection it is likely that methodologies for studying UAP already exist or can be adapted from analytical methods developed in other fields. Developing entirely new methodologies will likely be unnecessary and even a waste of resources, though adapting existing methods will still require some amount of dedicated effort. NASA could leverage its name, broad reach, and popularity to encourage and support an extensive review of existing methods for anomaly detection in the context of multidisciplinary conferences, workshops, and data challenges with mock datasets.
Observations Beyond Earth's Atmosphere
Even if all of the UAP events have conventional origins, the search for signs of life beyond Earth is a compelling scientific quest. For many years, researchers in astrobiology and SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, have focused on developing the techniques and methods needed to spot life's signatures in the cosmos. To do that, they must first identify an anomalous signature—perhaps something suggestive of life—and then determine if that signature has an explanation based on known phenomena or if it reveals previously undetected biological or even technological activity.
These NASA-supported scientific communities have relevant experience in first determining and then communicating whether observations that might at first appear extraordinary actually justify making extraordinary claims[5][6].
Many of NASA's science missions are, at least in part, focused on answering the question of whether life exists beyond Earth. Those investigations include missions looking for biosignatures, perhaps on Mars or the icy moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn—as well as farther afield, in the ratios of molecules present in exoplanet atmospheres.
Searching for signs of alien technology is a natural extension of those investigations. In 2017, Jill Tarter, one of the pioneers in the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, coined the term "technosignatures" to capture the breadth of technologies that might be detectable. Today, we consider technosignatures to be the fingerprints of an advanced civilization in the same way that we consider metabolic byproducts, or ratios of atmospheric gases, to be the fingerprints of biology.
NASA funded short-lived searches for radio technosignatures decades ago. More recently, the agency funded a study of potential atmospheric technosignatures on exoplanets; it also supported a survey for the waste heat generated by Dyson spheres in existing infrared data. Such surveys provide useful astrophysical data even in the absence of a technosignature discovery. In addition, solar system exploration offers multiple possibilities for technosignature searches at modest additional costs. These studies could provide scientifically useful results whether or not they identify technosignatures.
NASA is the lead agency for solar system exploration. It already has an active program of detecting objects in our solar neighborhood using both ground-based and space-based facilities, and it could leverage those capabilities to search for objects in space with anomalous motion or trajectories. For example, we are capable of launching spacecraft that can escape Earth's orbit—and even escape the Sun's gravity. A more advanced civilization could be capable of building crafts that can travel much faster than the 45 km/s escape velocity from Earth's orbit, or even the 600 km/s escape velocity from our Galaxy. Interstellar travel would likely require such speeds and may entail travel at relativistic velocities. Searching for high velocity objects moving through our solar system is an example of a high risk of failure/high value of return study. In addition to looking for anomalous velocities in new or existing datasets, search programs could target objects with unusual light curves, acceleration, spectral signatures, or other relevant anomalies.
Currently planned or existing NASA missions can widen their scope to include searching for extraterrestrial technosignatures in planetary atmospheres, on planetary surfaces, or in near-Earth space. These searches generally wouldn't require changes in hardware or data acquisition, but may simply require new directions in data analysis. For example, high sensitivity studies of the stable Earth-Moon Lagrange points might conceivably find technosignatures but would likely have a high scientific payoff, such as possibly finding remnants of the collision that formed our Moon.
At this point there is no reason to conclude that existing UAP reports have an extraterrestrial source. However, if we acknowledge that as one possibility, then those objects must have traveled through our solar system to get here. Just as the galaxy does not stop at the outskirts of the solar system, the solar system also includes Earth and its environs. Thus, there is an intellectual continuum between extrasolar technosignatures, solar system SETI, and potential unknown alien technology operating in Earth's atmosphere. If we recognize the plausibility of any of these, then we should recognize that all are at least plausible.
- ↑ https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201618
- ↑ Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick's presentation to this committee, May 31, 2023
- ↑ https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html/chap9_section_8.html
- ↑ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576522000480
- ↑ Community Report From the Biosignatures Standards of Evidence Workshop - https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14293
- ↑ National Academies Independent Review of the Community Report from the Biosignature Standards of Evidence Workshop: Report Series Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Sciences (2022) - https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/26621/independent-review-of-the-community-report-from-the-biosignature-standards-of-evidence-workshop