Office of the Secretary of Defense: 25_Sky_View_Final_Draft

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DNI report summarizes that there is no single explanation for all of these UAP, with potential
sources including clutter, commercial drones, national security threats, and other unexplained
phenomena. In 1969, another government effort, Project Blue Book determined that 701
sightings out of 12,618 were “unidentified,” but that there was no evidence of 1) any national
security threat, 2) advanced technologies beyond present capabilities or knowledge, and 3)
extraterrestrial vehicles (U.S. Air Force, nd). While there are some logical explanations for what
many are seeing, that they think is unexplained, there are still many uncertainties surrounding
UAP activity regardless of the source of the sightings. UAP research is often inconclusive.
However, our ability to explain these events seems to have diminished as our sensor technology
has advanced and our air activity has increased.
In this research, we ask three foundational research questions: 1) What is the viability of
publicly offered data on UAP sightings? 2) Are there credible spatial patterns to these sightings?
and 3) If so, can these patterns be explained by physical and/or built environment factors? To
answer these questions, we use UFO sighting data from the National UFO Research Center.
These data offer an opportunity to analyze sightings not available before at a large geographic
and temporal view. We model the total count of these sightings for a 20-year period from 2001-
2020, using environmental explanatory variables – light pollution, cloud cover, tree canopy
cover, airports, and military installations. This model is intended to represent both the available
view of the sky for any given county in the conterminous U.S., as well as the potential for
airborne objects. The main hypothesis of this research is that people will report sightings of
aerial objects where they have the most opportunity to see them. Specifically, we hypothesize
that a) factors that limit visibility will be negatively correlated with sightings, and b) that factors
related to air traffic will be positively correlated. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to
understand how the spatial variation in sightings is linked to environmental variables. This
analysis offers a starting point for similar correlation theory to be applied to U.S. Government
holdings on UAP activity to help identify possible sources, and represents the first serious
statistical look at the totality of the available data.
History of UAP sighting research and Environmental Explanations
There has been little in the way of traditional academic research on UAPs and UAP
sightings. This is expected as there are always efforts to discredit scientific endeavors toward
understanding this phenomenon (Appelle, 1998). As well, verifiable data sources and
questionable accounts have limited the rigor of previous work. While UAPs are typically things
of science fiction, we cannot ignore the fact that many people throughout the world report having
seen unknown objects in the sky that they cannot explain. In the U.S. there has been significant
recent attention given to sightings by members of the military, or other U.S. government
personnel. Databases of these events are now being kept by the AARO and the supporting
Services, but these efforts only began in 2019, though they do hold information going back to
1996 (Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2022). Congress has directed AARO to
extend this research back to 1945.Page determined to be Unclassified
Reviewed by Chief of Staff, AARO
IAW FY24 NDAA, Section 1841 (a)(1)(C)
Date: 02/06/2025