The Confronting Unknowns Framework

The Confronting Unknowns Framework (CUF) proposes treating anomalous events as a pipeline of four interdependent stages:

Detect, Identify, Respond, and Explain. (D-I-R-E)

It differs from legacy approaches in that uncertainty, rather than being forced to dissolve into a resolved/unresolved dichotomy, is made explicit and carried all the way from detecting to explaining anomalies to the audiences who need them: operational commanders, congressional staff, journalists, as well as the wider public who watch the same skies. As shown in Figure 4 below, data flows left-to-right through Detect → Identify → Respond → Explain. At each junction, the downstream stage targets uncertainty in the previous stage to offer iterative improvement, whether by increasing the sophistication of the analysis or offering more concrete actions and outcomes, or both.

Figure 4. The Confronting Unknowns Framework, in which data flows through Detect, Identify, Respond, and Explain stages.

Our perspective is that central to thoughtful emergency responses is the ability to retain a sense of proportion for what could be causing an event, without jumping to conclusion.¹Footnote 11 Supporting CUF is a set of hypotheses and a suggested approach to managing it. See Identifying Unknowns, Part II: Detect & Identify.

Detect: Is Something There?

Military radars are optimized for known profiles: aircraft with expected signatures, speeds, and altitudes. Air traffic control tracks cooperative targets broadcasting transponder signals. Weather radars, satellite constellations, and maritime monitoring systems observe the relevant domains but were never designed to correlate their data around anomalous events. Indeed, most of the sensor stack inherited the mission of an earlier era. Post-Sputnik radars were tuned to detect intercontinental ballistic missiles.

None of these systems was tasked to characterize objects whose kinematics—the geometry of motion—did not match the threat the system was built to detect. That’s why we have the paradox of capable sensors but face siloed data, processing pipelines tuned to suppress the signals that matter here, and retention policies that discard potentially relevant information before anyone thinks to look for it.

Capable sensors, siloed data, and processing pipelines are tuned to suppress the signals that matter here, and retention policies discard relevant information before anyone thinks to look for it.

Identify: What Is It?

The conventional UAP approach sorts anomalous events into “resolved” and “unresolved.” This is useful for top-line bookkeeping but poorly suited to events that develop over time, involve partial evidence from multiple modalities, or demand decisions before definitive attribution. A radar track that is 60% consistent with a commercial drone, 25% consistent with an atmospheric artifact, and 15% consistent with something genuinely unusual is poorly summarized by the “unresolved” label.

Respond: What To Do, and Who Decides?

Respond is the stage where identification becomes action: who is notified, who decides, on what evidence, and with what authority. The New Jersey incursions showed what happens when none of that is settled in advance. No agency held the seam between the FAA, DHS, FBI, DoD, and state emergency management, because the event never crossed any single agency's threshold for a credible threat, and so the response was improvised in public.

This paper treats response in three places rather than one. The Crisis Playbook later in this Part gives senior decision-makers a structured way to act in the first hours of an incident: classify the situation, work a pre-designated contact chain, guard against decision traps, and select a proportionate, authorized response. Part III: Respond & Explain examines how the New Jersey response broke down and what an aligned response would have looked like.

Part IV: An Action Agenda for New Unknowns translates both into an action agenda for readiness and interagency coordination.

Explain: What To Say, By Whom and When?

When communication is treated as an afterthought it becomes the most consequential signal of all. The information vacuum²Footnote 22 The measurement of information vacuums is ongoing and includes work among some of the authors [14]. in 2024 was filled by a Congressman’s claim of an Iranian mothership, a loose-nuke theory that migrated from a podcast to mainstream media, and a mass-hysteria narrative that dismissed credible eyewitnesses alongside dubious ones. The framework provides a fourth option with Explain: follow a structured protocol that preserves evidence, manages uncertainty, and communicates clearly under uncertainty.

Following are tables that recommend strategies for different demographics. Policymakers should review Table 1 below, Operators refer to Table 2, Researchers to Table 3, and Communicators to Table 4.

A radar track that reads as 60% consistent with a commercial drone, 25% consistent with an atmospheric artifact, and 15% consistent with something genuinely anomalous cannot simply be labelled ‘unresolved’.

Table 1. Strategy for policymakers.

Table 2. Strategy for Operators.

Table 3. Strategy for Researchers.

Table 4. Strategy for Communicators.