Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Credit: Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU)

There is a lengthy legacy of flying saucer folklore, of alien interlopers from afar; of governmental cover-ups tied to calls for “full disclosure” – an exposé that would divulge our Earth is, indeed, a stopover for starfolk whisking throughout the universe.

Tales of recovered vehicles and occupants, those poor souls that after crossing interstellar space discover a leak in brake fluid causing their craft to auger into our planet.

It goes on and on.

Unclassified report

The upsurge of public and government interest in Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), now tagged as Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP), is palpable.

That fact is underscored by the January 12 release of an unclassified version of a Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) report on UAP to Congress. It’s a required-by-law annual report.

The ODNI document emphasizes that UAP reporting is on the rise. “This increased reporting allows more opportunities to apply rigorous analysis and resolve events,” the report states.

Office of resolution

ODNI coordinated its report with the newly established All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), stood up last July under the Department of Defense to harmonize efforts across the U.S. federal landscape to help study UAP.

AARO’s mission involves looking into “anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects.”

Then there’s the signed into law 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that includes U.S. lawmaker lingo calling for more UAP and UFO insight.

Also diving in on UAP is a NASA blue ribbon study group tasked, in part, to scope out how NASA can use data to move the scientific understanding of UAPs forward.

Areas of research

Recently, the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies noted that some of the key areas stipulated by the U.S. Congress in the 2022 NDAA, items to be included in the UAP report by ODNI, did not make it into the public version presented to Congress.

These are also areas of research that future reports should address a number of items “as openly as possible,” the Coalition explains in a recent statement, such as:

• The number of reported incidents over restricted air space, and an analysis of such incidents.
• An assessment of any UAP activity that can be attributed to one or more adversarial foreign governments.
• Identification of any incidents or patterns.
• An update on any efforts underway on the ability to capture or exploit discovered UAP.
• The number of reported incidents, and descriptions thereof, associated with military nuclear assets, including strategic nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered ships and submarines.
• The number of reported incidents, and descriptions thereof, associated with nuclear material with weapons storage or civilian nuclear facilities.

The Coalition adds that it looks forward to the information that the ODNI and AARO “will be sharing with the public in the future, and is grateful that the U.S. government agrees that UAP are a critical area of scientific study.”

Daniel Evans, the assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (Right) gave list of NASA’s UAP panelists to Bill Nelson, NASA chief, for his approval.
Image credit: NASA

Independent study team

For its part, NASA announced in June 2022 that an independent study team was being assembled to look into the UAP state of affairs.

A confab of 16 individuals, including scientists, aeronautical experts, and data analytics aficionados are now engaged in shedding light on the origin and nature of UAP.

That nine-month study effort is under the guidance of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, with the space agency declaring it is pursuing the assessment for the agency’s own science and air safety motives.

Katherine Rohloff, a spokesperson for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, says that the space agency has updated its “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study” public website to clarify the meeting cadence and output from the group.

The study team is periodically meeting to identify what data, from civilian government entities, commercial data and information from other sources, can potentially be pored over to help evaluate UAP.

A next step will be recommending a roadmap for potential future NASA unidentified anomalous data analysis.

After wrapping up the study, the information gleaned is to be released in a publicly available report. NASA expects to hold a full meeting of its UAP study team in late spring of this year, the NASA website explains, with the team findings to be broadcast to the public.

UAP have been reported by Navy pilots unlike anything they have ever witnessed.
Image credit: Enigma Labs/Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich

Community of interest

A seeing-is-believing person is Ryan Graves. As a former Lt. U.S. Navy and F/A-18F pilot, he was the first active duty flyer to report publicly about his and fellow pilot encounters with UAP.

Graves now chairs the newly-formed UAP permanent Community of Interest within the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), a group of over 30,000 aerospace professionals. The UAP faction is focused on alleviating the barriers to the scientific study of whatever it is, he says.

Shown at Congressional hearing, Video 1 2021 flyby movie showing a purported UAP.
Credit: Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee/Inside Outer Space screengrab

“We’re off and running,” says Graves with his group subdivided into human factors, hardware factors, and outreach subcommittees. “We’ll also be collaborating with various groups to validate and verify some of our hypotheses about [UAP] detection events,” he told Inside Outer Space.

“I approach this very agnostically. It’s not about aliens, UFOs or what have you. There’s an anomaly. We have detections of something that we can’t explain,” Graves adds. “Our mission is focused on aerospace safety. Our charter is to improve aviation safety by enhancing scientific knowledge, and mitigating barriers to the study of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.”

Graves is engaged in a series of “Merged Podcast” productions on UAP.

For example, go to a pilot’s UAP Sighting and what it means for aviation at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjildVLwSHw

To view the unclassified version of the ODNI document, go to:

https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Unclassified-2022-Annual-Report-UAP.pdf