An Action Agenda for New Unknowns

What to Build Before the Next Incident

1. What scientific infrastructure does anomaly research need, and how should its discoveries be governed?

2. Which detection and identification capabilities deliver the most value per dollar?

3. What must be in place before the next incident so the response is not improvised?

4. How do institutions rebuild public trust before they need it?

Confronting future unknowns requires investment today. Anomalous-phenomena research offers genuine scientific upside in materials science, atmospheric physics, and sensor design (among other areas), and it carries equally genuine risks in biosecurity, cybersecurity, and national security. Both the upside and the risk point to the same instrument: a technology governance roadmap that names the decision points for classification, controlled disclosure, and dual-use oversight.

Part I's Crisis Playbook addressed what to do in the first hours of an incident; this Part addresses what to build before the next one, organized as four tiers of action and four supporting priorities:

Table 11. Immediate Actions and Priorities.

The Church Committee Model to rebuild public trust

Formally acknowledge and end past information management activities. Congress could hold hearings and formally acknowledge past activities of disinformation, whistleblower reprisals and other unethical activities conducted by US Government in relation to anomalous phenomena going back to the 1940s.

This formal acknowledgement process may be modeled on the Church Committee Hearings [1], the 1975–1976 Senate investigation that publicly documented decades of intelligence abuses and produced lasting oversight reforms, and paired with whistleblower protections. These measures may help in rebuilding public trust in government prior to moving forward with any new policy for a more open and transparent communication on future incidents. These would work well with whistleblower protections, which have been included in previous iterations of UAP transparency legislation.

Inset B: The Church Committee is a model to account for past information-management activities.

Action 1: Support Science for a New Era

The scientific investigation of anomalous phenomena requires a well-funded, well-governed infrastructure that does not yet exist. Federal science agencies, universities, private philanthropy, and technology-governance institutions (NIST, CISA, FCC) each hold a piece of the puzzle; none holds enough alone. The opportunity is extraordinary: anomalous-phenomena research touches physics, biology, materials science, astronomy, earth science, and sensor engineering. The risk is commensurate. Without governance, the same discoveries that could unlock clean energy or hypersonic travel could introduce biosecurity, cybersecurity, or national-security hazards that no existing framework is designed to manage.

Identify Scientific Investigation Priorities & Funding Needs

• Create Scientific Discoveries Road Map. Prepare an analysis of key research questions, potential applications, and research pathways needed for discoveries. Studies of anomalous phenomena cover many areas of scientific investigation from physics, biological, materials, astronomy, planetary and earth science. The potential discoveries could have applications across many domains including clean energy, hypersonic travel, materials science, communications technology, neuroscience and more.

• Establish dedicated research funding categories for anomalous phenomena studies. Direct federal science agencies, beginning with NSF, DOE, and NASA, to create named program elements or cross-directorate initiatives under which research proposals on anomalous phenomena can be explicitly submitted, reviewed, and tracked. Currently, no federal science agency offers a competitive grant category for this research; investigators must frame UAP-relevant work under adjacent disciplines, rendering it institutionally invisible and reinforcing professional stigma. Peer-reviewed studies [51] have found that the availability of competitive research grants is the single most important factor that would unlock faculty participation. A formal category would provide a legitimacy signal for tenure and promotion decisions, enable systematic tracking of funding levels and research gaps, and establish civilian science funding infrastructure commensurate with the governmental attention this topic now receives.

• Develop Research Needs Assessment and Funding Plan. Conduct a full consultation with scientific organizations and other stakeholders on key research questions and discovery pathways. Prepare an action plan with potential government sponsors, scientific philanthropy and private funding sources that might be made available to fund each project.

• Fund observational feasibility studies for anomalous phenomena detection. UAP research presents a distinctive challenge: there is no predictive theory to guide where, when, or how to observe, and the phenomena appear to be rare and transient. Before committing to large-scale observational campaigns, agencies should fund systematic studies assessing which combinations of sensor technologies, geographic locations, and monitoring strategies would maximize the probability of capturing scientifically useful data at an acceptable cost. This includes evaluating existing infrastructure, such as weather radar networks, satellite constellations, and astronomical survey instruments, for untapped potential to detect anomalous events, as well as informing the design of purpose-built multi-sensor observatories. Such studies would establish the evidence base needed to make rational investment decisions about observational programs.

• Establish research institutes and coordination mechanisms. Identify potential performers of scientific investigations and coordinated mechanisms for funding and grants. Where appropriate, identify mechanisms for open-source database development and data sharing and potential creation of non-profit independent Focused Research Organizations (FROs) [52] that can coordinate inputs from researchers based at multiple institutions and across multiple disciplines.

Currently, no federal science agency offers a competitive grant category for frontier research.

Establish Technology Governance

• Clarify patent and IP treatment for UAP-derived technologies. Policymakers should address how intellectual property law would apply to discoveries or technologies emerging from UAP research. If UAP are engineered artifacts, reverse-engineered technologies may raise prior-art or ownership problems. If they are natural phenomena, the underlying principles may not be patentable at all. Clarifying this framework early would reduce legal uncertainty and help determine whether private investment can realistically support UAP-related research and development, to include internationally-developed technologies and capabilities.

• Set clear rules for compartmentalization, secrecy orders, and export controls. Policymakers should clarify when UAP-related research, patents, materials, or reverse-engineering programs should remain classified, compartmentalized, restricted under secrecy orders, or subject to export-control regimes, or be on a pathway to be made available on a restricted access basis only or for open-source scientific investigations. This should include guidance on the degree of compartmentalization, oversight mechanisms, criteria for declassification or controlled release, and how existing frameworks such as the Invention Secrecy Act, Atomic Energy Act, ITAR/EAR controls, and defense-classification authorities would apply to potential breakthrough technologies. Operational practices for partial release of classified sensor data already exist. Released video can be masked to obscure sensor-specific artefacts so the imagery is shareable without disclosing the collection method. These practices should be standardized across agencies, not improvised case by case.

• Clarify guidance on private sector data sharing with government agencies. Clarify what data sharing policies and incident reporting requirements will govern private research initiatives, particularly when there is a public health, safety, or national security threat.

• Develop a technology risk and opportunity assessment. Develop an assessment of risks that could result from the investigation, experimentation, and dissemination of findings of studies of anomalous phenomena and their mitigations. This assessment should also consider the opportunity offered by potential technological and scientific breakthroughs, and how to integrate public purpose, while also rewarding private investment, in the dissemination of such breakthroughs.

• Build a technology governance roadmap. Develop a forward-looking governance framework for managing potential discoveries arising from scientific investigations of anomalous phenomena, with particular attention to findings that could carry biosecurity, cybersecurity, or national security risks. The roadmap should identify decision points for classification, controlled disclosure, and dual-use oversight, and should address discoveries originating from both government-funded and private research initiatives.

Action 2: Enhance Detection and Identification Capabilities

Detection and identification capabilities must serve two purposes simultaneously: frontline operators who need answers in minutes, and researchers who need reproducible data that survives peer review. Academic and government scientists, independent research organizations, private sensor companies, and the operators themselves all contribute. Open-source data and high-quality peer-reviewed studies will improve anomaly detection across all domains and advance the scientific understanding that underpins credible policy.

Develop Dedicated Observatories for UAP Scientific Investigations

Observatory investment is the single highest-leverage action for transforming UAP research from anecdotal reporting into calibrated, reproducible science. The dedicated observatories described in Appendix E: Diagnostic Triage for Sensor Faults, Interference, and Deception and the sensor-tier framework in Part II: Detect & Identify provide the technical foundation; the policy actions below translate that foundation into funded programs.

• Site a baseline network in low-coverage areas. Existing surveillance systems reveal where sensors are, but not necessarily where events occur. Reviewing the historical incident record for sparsely monitored regions would help distinguish observation bias from genuine activity patterns and identify where new sites would provide the greatest coverage gains. A statistically designed network of calibrated sites in sparsely monitored regions would provide the control data needed to distinguish genuine spatial patterns from observation bias, while extending data acquisition into the corridors least observed by current systems.

Create Next Generation Sensors Capabilities for UAP Observation

• Integrate hyperspectral sensing into current sensor platforms. Support integration of hyperspectral imaging sensors onto platforms that currently carry FLIR systems. This is the single most achievable investment that adds materials compositional capabilities to operational sensor suites to distinguish (bird, drone, balloon, etc.).

• Develop next-generation sensors for UAP observation. Invest in novel sensor capabilities designed after the observational requirements and concept of operation of typical UAP incidents. Repurposing existing sensors, engineered for different observation targets, has limited returns for phenomena that manifest differently than most known technologies.

Build Standardized Data Collection & Classifiers

• Develop a verified taxonomy of anomalous events. Compile an unclassified system for categorizing the types and characteristics of phenomena reported in the airspace, since reported UAP are likely a mix of human-made, natural, and other phenomena. A common catalog would give analysts, operators, and the public a shared language for describing what is observed, and it could be built from both public and classified information without requiring the declassification of the underlying data.¹Footnote 11 This descriptive taxonomy is distinct from the explanatory hypothesis space used to identify an event. The taxonomy standardizes how an observation is described; the H1-H5 hypothesis space (described in Part II: Detect & Identify) are the candidate causes over which an analyst distributes probability for a single case. Description is upstream of explanation, and keeping the two separate prevents a label for what was seen from hardening into a verdict on what caused it. Standardized description in turn strengthens the identification, response, and explanation stages.

• Build a data discovery engine. Develop a tool that, given the approximate location and time of an observation, identifies what monitoring systems were observing that same volume of space. (Including weather radar, satellite imaging, ADS-B, AIS, radiosonde, see Appendix C: Existing surveillance, sensing, and reporting infrastructure.)

Develop Open-Source Data Sharing for Scientific Investigations

• Publish open detection architectures. Follow the model established by the Galileo Project [53] and publish detailed engineering specifications that provide an auditable record for the generated data and can inspire the further development of new observational concepts and capabilities. The platform could be used by research to develop reproducible studies, which is a prerequisite for highly credible, peer-reviewed research.

Invest in AI-assisted Models for Anomaly Resolution

• Develop AI-assisted identification of anomalous events. Develop anomalous incident analysis pipelines based on multimodal Large Language Models that can detect anomalies in sensor data including how human-AI collaboration should be structured in safety-critical settings.

• Develop machine-learning tools for UAP investigation. Develop object-recognition algorithms to distinguish conventional drones and UAP for use in frontline operations. The cost decomposition matters. A UAP detection-and-classification pipeline built atop existing foundation models is a $1–10M effort. A UAP-specific foundation model trained from scratch could be a $100M+ effort²Footnote 22 A substantial fraction of this cost would be gathering training data. and risks rapid obsolescence against the rapid evolution of commercial multimodal models. As Part II: Detect & Identify explains (“Anomaly Analysis: Artificial Intelligence for Unknowns”), a pipeline built on commercial foundation models inherits each new generation of those models, while a model trained from scratch is frozen at its training date and falls behind. We recommend the pipeline-first path.

• Develop probabilistic models of anomalous events. Replace the resolved/unresolved labeling system with one that preserves ranked explanations and structured uncertainty rather than collapsing each case to a single verdict. The CUF hypothesis space (H1–H5) is a deliberately simple starting model; three directions would strengthen it. First, setting the initial probabilities for each explanation transparently, and adjusting them across contexts, factoring-in how a civilian airport differs from a restricted military range. Second, weighing and combining evidence of uneven quality from radar, infrared, acoustic, and human sources. Third, and most valuable: letting the list of explanations grow as evidence accumulates, so that a genuinely novel event prompts a new category rather than being forced into the catch-all (H5). Methods to do this exist and are well established in machine learning.

Action 3: Improve Aerospace Incident Readiness & Response

The New Jersey incursions demonstrated that no incident-command framework exists for ambiguous low-altitude aerospace events. Congress, the NSC, DHS, FAA, federal and state law enforcement, counter-UAS operators, and frontline responders all have roles, but no protocol assigns them. Thoughtful public communications and standardized event reporting require the kind of advance preparation that currently exists for pandemics, nuclear incidents, and financial crises but not for drone waves.

Conduct Federal & State Emergency Management Policy Reviews

• Review the homeland security Incident Command System (ICS). Review how FEMA approaches ‘drone waves’ under its current policies and protocols and advise on key policy gaps and support needs to better manage future incidents.

• Clarify how the FAA issues flight restrictions. Review how the FAA issues flight restrictions in response to reports of drone waves or reports of anomalous sightings and how best to balance air safety with air traffic disruptions.

• Bridge the decide-and-respond gap. Evaluate which decision architectures are appropriate for events where identification yields a probability distribution rather than an attribution. Advise on how rules of engagement, airspace management, and interagency coordination adapt to probabilistic uncertainties.

• Build data tools to create a universal operational picture. Create a data capture, classification and management system where any reporting or event is fused with ADS-B, Remote ID, FAA flight data, weather, radar if available, 911 calls, and critical-infrastructure maps.

• Map detection blind spots and place sensors to close them. Study the historical record for sparsely populated and lightly monitored regions to estimate how much of the current picture reflects where sensors and observers already are, rather than where events actually occur. Use that analysis to prioritize sensor placement in the zones the record cannot currently see.

• Support state-level coordination. New Jersey’s A5712, Vermont’s H.654, and Connecticut’s H.B.5422 represent an accelerating movement of state responses. While constructive, they risk fragmenting a problem that requires federal coherence. Congress should establish federal-state coordination that incorporates state-level research and reporting into a national system.

Support Frontline Operators Responding to Anomalous Events

• Create a drone-incursion FEMA/NIMS/ICS playbook. Review how drone waves and anomalous events are treated as incidents under NIMS/ICS and develop a playbook for incident commanders and first responders.

• Fund and train local c-UAS response teams on anomalous phenomena. Create training for c-UAS response teams on anomalous phenomena and mainstream the training across military, law enforcement and private security services operators qualified to operate c-UAS systems.

Develop Interagency Coordination and Communication Protocols

• Establish inter-agency communication protocols for anomalous events. Direct the NSC to develop and exercise inter-agency protocols for anomalous aerospace incursions, analogous to existing protocols for natural disasters and terrorism. The New Jersey incident demonstrated that no such protocol exists, as opposed to extensive existing playbooks for a pandemic, nuclear incident, or financial crisis.

• Clarify management of classified information. Clarify the command structure and information management process for creating and communicating classified information during response to events involving anomalous phenomena.

• Develop standardized event data-preservation infrastructure. Mandate reporting and retention standards that preserve raw data, metadata, sensor calibration state, and chain of custody. AARO’s intake processes reduce events to narrative summaries insufficient for re-analysis [54].

• Develop a public communication template for anomalous airspace events. Pre-draft templates that acknowledge detection, describe the state of identification, and commit to follow-up. This directly addresses the vocabulary gap: officials need prepared language for the honest intermediate between “we know what it is” and silence.

• Strengthen aviation safety reporting. Expand NASA’s ASRS or establish a parallel channel for anomalous event reporting by commercial pilots and air traffic controllers. The 2023 NASA UAP Independent Study [55] recommended this; it has not been implemented.

Action 4: Engage the Public

Public trust is the medium through which every other recommendation in this paper travels. If institutions cannot communicate honestly about what they detect and what they do not yet understand, the information vacuum will be filled by speculation, conspiracy, and improvisation. Media organizations, journalists, online platforms, scientific bodies, healthcare institutions, Congress, and government public-affairs officers each shape the information environment; none controls it.

Build Trusted Information Environments

• Map the current information environment. No systematic study has charted the sources, intermediaries, and amplification pathways through which information about anomalous phenomena reaches the public. Such a study would identify which experts journalists consult, which platforms host the most active discourse, and where misinformation originates and propagates. Without this map, any communication strategy operates blind.

• Train the communicators. Three groups need structured preparation. Government public affairs officers at the White House, DHS, FAA, and DoD need protocols and vocabulary for events that are detected but not identified. Journalists and trust-and-safety teams at social media platforms (Meta, X, Reddit, YouTube) need briefings on the distinction between misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation in the specific context of anomalous aerospace events, where ground truth is genuinely uncertain and premature debunking can be as damaging as premature confirmation. Scientists who speak with the media and advise policymakers during anomalous events also need public communications training and support on how to communicate unknowns.³Footnote 33 C.f. the International Science Reserve (ISR) [56], established to assist governments in a crisis like a pandemic, volcanic eruption, et cetera.

• Build an open-source information portal for public education. A public-facing clearinghouse (e.g. Propublica’s Rx Inspector [57] or Cochrane Review’s Plain Language Summaries (PLS) of medical evidence [58]) could aggregate information from official sources, peer-reviewed research, and credible detection projects. The goal: a persistent, citable, evidence-graded resource that journalists, legislators, and researchers can reference when an incident occurs. The portal could include information such as information on understanding sensors, expert interpretation of declassified information and imagery, Q&As on current events, as well as rapid-fire lessons on deep-fake debunking and information quality assessment, as well as fact-checking best practices and outreach for all ages.

Provide Health Services and Sensemaking Support

• Prepare healthcare providers. Individuals who report close encounters with anomalous phenomena frequently describe physical symptoms, psychological distress, or both. In the United Kingdom, the nonprofit UnHidden provides training to NHS providers on supporting patients reporting extraordinary experiences. No equivalent exists in the United States. Primary care physicians and mental health professionals need clinical guidance that neither pathologizes reporting nor validates specific interpretations. Protocols to deal with physical effects most likely due to exposure to ionizing or microwave radiation may be useful to deal also with other emerging threats, such as direct-energy weapons.

• Engage sensemaking communities. The experience of anomalous events and findings of scientific studies involving anomalous phenomena are often interpreted through the lens of teachings of religion, indigenous traditions and spirituality. Additionally, many findings of UAP scientific studies could challenge long held beliefs across many scientific fields from physics, earth science, anthropology, neuroscience and more. These communities need meaningful consultation and engagement in the design, participation, and dissemination of studies, for study findings to be broadly accepted.

Implications by Audience: Action Agenda

The agenda above is substantive. Below is an arrangement for the people who must carry it out.

For policymakers. First, establish a named research funding category for anomalous-phenomena studies at NSF, DOE, and NASA: peer-reviewed work has identified this as the single most important unlock for faculty participation [51], and the absence of a named category is what currently makes the field institutionally invisible. Second, direct the NSC to develop and exercise inter-agency communication protocols for anomalous aerospace incursions, on the analogy of pandemic, nuclear-incident, and financial-crisis playbooks; this is the same Tier 1 lever converged on in Part I: The Problem and Part III: Respond & Explain. Third, pursue a Church Committee–style formal acknowledgment of past information-management activities, paired with whistleblower protections already drafted in prior UAPDA iterations [3]; the sequencing matters because any forward disclosure will be received against an unresolved historical ledger.

For operators. The agenda for operators converges on standardization. A drone-incursion FEMA/NIMS/ICS playbook for incident commanders and first responders. Training for c-UAS response teams on anomalous phenomena specifically, mainstreamed across military, law enforcement, and private security. Expansion of NASA's ASRS, or a parallel channel for anomalous-event reporting by commercial pilots and air traffic controllers, which the 2023 NASA UAP Independent Study [55] recommended and which has not been implemented. And a universal operational picture tool that fuses ADS-B, Remote ID, FAA flight data, weather, radar, 911 calls, and critical-infrastructure maps; this is an engineering project, not a research project.

For scientists & researchers. Part IV's research agenda is the most concrete in the paper. The high-leverage items: observational feasibility studies to identify which sensor-location-strategy combinations maximize useful data per dollar; hyperspectral CONOPS development; multimodal LLM identification pipelines with explicit attention to false confidence and hallucination failure modes; probabilistic models calibrated against the H1–H5 hypothesis space with attention to how priors should differ across operational contexts; and Focused Research Organization structures [52] for cross-institutional coordination. The agenda is intentionally heterogeneous because the underlying phenomena, on current evidence, are heterogeneous.

For public communicators. Part IV: An Action Agenda for New Unknowns is specific about the communicator agenda. Map the current information environment, sources, intermediaries, amplification pathways, because no systematic study has been done and any strategy will operate blindly without that map. Build a public information portal that aggregates official sources, peer-reviewed work, and credible detection projects into a citable, evidence-graded resource. Train three communicator populations: government public affairs officers, journalists and platform trust-and-safety teams, and the scientists who advise the public during anomalous events. And engage healthcare and sensemaking communities upstream of the next incident, primary care physicians and mental health clinicians need clinical guidance that neither pathologizes reporting nor promotes specific interpretations.

The Most Important Change to Make…

The Tier 1 protocol is the only recommendation in this paper upon which the other recommendations depend. Hyperspectral payloads, the H1–H5 hypothesis space, the public information portal, and every operator-level shift named in Part II run through the inter-agency seam. The 76 days between the Picatinny event and the Press Secretary's “no national security threat” statement are the operational definition of why the protocol needs to exist before the next incident.

An Argument That Does Not Depend on the Answer

Our framework is deliberately agnostic about what anomalous aerospace events ultimately are. It sets aside questions of non-human intelligence, exotic propulsion, and novel physics. Whatever the objects turn out to be, the institutional infrastructure required to confront them is the same: better detection, identification under uncertainty, credible communication.

The investment is justified by demonstrated failure, not by any assumption about what the objects are. Suppose the unknowns prove mundane. The infrastructure improves aerospace safety, operational awareness, and public trust. Suppose instead the unknowns prove extraordinary. The infrastructure provides the evidentiary foundation without which extraordinary claims cannot be responsibly evaluated. The first step does not change.