Documents / Report
This is the final report of NASA's Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team, a 16-member external panel chaired by Dr. David Spergel, with a foreword by Dr. Nicola Fox. The report says it is not a review of past incidents. It concludes that UAP analysis is limited by poor data, calibration and metadata, and that NASA should support AARO's whole-of-government effort. It recommends using NASA satellites, commercial imagery, AI, crowdsourcing apps and the Aviation Safety Reporting System, and reducing stigma around reporting.
“NASA”29 pages
16 approach, on the other hand, requires an understanding of what is considered normal and known in a given search area, which can then be distinguished from what is unusual and unknown. AARO has already begun this task by studying what “normal” phenomena such as solar glint or balloons look like to military sensors. The program of systematically calibrating observations of “normal” is an essential step before starting to search for the abnormal. A third potential avenue for scientific analysis is to cross-correlate NASA’s extensive databases with the locations and times of reported UAP events. Once an extensive list of UAP reports is made available, the panel regards this as a promising method for future analysis. Again, NASA's expertise in AI and ML will allow it to make a prominent contribution. For any scientific analysis purposes, including UAP analysis, it is essential that the data used for AI and ML are collected according to rigorous standards. The data must be collected using calibrated instruments tailored to their respective use cases accompanied by metadata to facilitate calibration and contextual comprehension. Proper curation and integration of data are also critical for enabling scientific analysis. To establish a baseline understanding, an exam- ination of known events with precisely calibrated instruments is also neces- sary. NASA, with its expertise in data calibration, management, and advanced analysis is well-positioned to take a central role in these efforts within the whole-of-government framework to assess UAP. Observations of UAP to date are inconsistent and do not adhere to similar characteristics. As a consequence, it is difficult to put physical constraints on them at present, which provides a strong motivation for the rigorous, evidence- based framework articulated in this report. The strongest physical constraints are not on the anomalous events but on the conventional events: we know the range of velocities and accelerations that can be achieved by state-of-the art platforms, drones, balloons and planes. Deviations from this behavior, such as any well-characterized observation of velocities and accelerations outside of that range, are scientifically interesting for UAP assessment and analysis. The panel emphasizes that clearly determining distances is key to understanding and corroborating any claimed anomalous high-velocity and high-acceleration events, a fact borne out by AARO’s findings that the vast majority of UAP have prosaic explanations. In considering the factors above, what basic physical constraints can be placed on the nature and origins of UAP? 5 FINDING NASA, with its expertise in data calibration, management, and advanced analysis is well-positioned to take a central role in these efforts.
Report, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 36 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.