Papers, guides, and tools from Sensemaking’s research.
How should institutions act when something appears in the sky that resists immediate attribution? This paper proposes the Confronting Unknowns Framework: Detect, Identify, Respond, Explain (D-I-R-E), a pipeline whose stages each fail when the adjacent stage fails. The problem it addresses is institutional, not phenomenological: the United States lacks the detection architecture, the inference methodology, and the communication infrastructure to say what it does and does not know about objects in its own airspace. The framework is applied to the 2024–2025 drone-wave incidents and is agnostic about what the objects ultimately are, and opinionated about what we owe each other when we cannot yet say.
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