Executive Summary

The case for confronting anomalous aerospace events does not depend on what they turn out to be. Whether the objects are ordinary or extraordinary, the institutional work required to face them is the same, and it is overdue. A nation should be able to say what it does and does not know about the objects in its own airspace. Today it often cannot, as evidenced by large-scale incidents over a wide-range public, critical, and military with real consequences. The gap is largely about engineering, inference, communication, and the systems that connect them – not just about the objects themselves. A nation that cannot identify what is in its airspace has a safety problem, one that cannot communicate honestly about what it does and does not know has a trust problem.

Three forces make this urgent now. Airspace is more crowded than the systems built to watch it: more than one million drones were registered with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) by December 2024, tracked by systems designed for an earlier era. The legislative response is accelerating and contradictory, with states standing up Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) research centers and airspace task forces while Congress weighs dissolving a federal office meant to coordinate the problem. And the online information environment has compressed decision timelines from weeks to hours: the New Jersey drone incursions generated more public discourse in 72 hours than the entire Project Blue Book archive, leaving officials to choose between speaking early and ceding the narrative to speculation.

New Jersey showed the cost. Over the 76 days between the first sighting at Picatinny Arsenal and a White House statement that the drones had been "authorized... for research and various other reasons," no entity or authority held the seam between the FAA, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Defense (DoD), and state emergency management. A year later, the governor's office still had no definitive explanation. The most consequential signals were never the objects; they were the institutional responses of contradictions, silences, expertise refused, closure declared without explanation.

We propose treating anomalous events as a pipeline of four interdependent stages. ‘Detect’ captures and preserves evidence with sensors and observers calibrated for objects outside known profiles. ‘Identify’ translates that evidence into ranked hypotheses under explicit uncertainty, rather than a binary "resolved / unresolved" verdict. ‘Respond’ coordinates the interagency decision chain so that "who decides, and on what evidence?" has an answer before the next event. ‘Explain’ communicates findings and uncertainty to the audiences who need them—commanders, congressional staff, journalists, and the public who watch the same skies.

Part I: The Problem explains the problem being faced. Part II: Detect & Identify and Part III: Respond & Explain develop approaches to a solution in full. See Part IV: An Action Agenda for New Unknowns for detailed policy prescriptions.

Our recommendations are agnostic to what such anomalous objects turn out to be. Four are the most impactful:

1. Stand up an inter-agency communication protocol for anomalous aerospace incursions. Direct the National Security Council (NSC), FEMA, and other federal agencies to develop and exercise it, on the model of existing pandemic, nuclear-incident, and natural-disaster playbooks. This is the one recommendation the others depend on: every sensor upgrade and analytic method still has to run through the same interagency seam that failed over New Jersey.

2. Create named research funding categories for anomalous-phenomena studies at NSF, DOE, and NASA. The absence of a category under its own name is what makes the field institutionally invisible today; naming it is a simple and impactful way to facilitate serious academic and institutional participation.

3. Train the communicators who will face the next event—public affairs officers, journalists, platform trust-and-safety teams, and frontline operators and clinicians. Map the information environment, build a citable clearinghouse of vetted sources, and engage the public deliberately.

4. Pursue a Church Committee–style formal accounting of prior information-management practices. Before any new response infrastructure is built for aerospace events, we must understand the gaps of recent and past systems. Any communication or disclosure framework will be weighed down by an unresolved historical ledger. Whistleblower protections pair with this recommendation.

This is the throughline stated at the outset: the argument does not depend on the answer. If the unknowns prove mundane, the same infrastructure improves aerospace safety, operational awareness, and public trust. If they, or even one, prove extraordinary, it provides the evidentiary foundation without which extraordinary claims cannot be responsibly evaluated. The first step does not change. What it requires is better engineering, better inference, better communication, and better institutional design.