Recommendations to Improve Acquisition and Management of Aviation-Related UAP Data
Martin Snow · John M. Platte · John-Michael Gutierrez · Ted Roe · Ryan Graves
AIAA AVIATION Forum 2023 · 2023
Five aviation and safety researchers propose routing all pilot UAP reports through NASA's existing Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) to create a confidential, standardized, and stigma-resistant national data pipeline.
Brief
The paper, presented at the AIAA AVIATION Forum 2023, argues that the current UAP reporting landscape for aviation is fragmented across incompatible channels, FAA incident reports, military chains of command, civilian databases like NUFORC, with no single authoritative, confidential intake. The authors recommend NASA's ASRS as the natural host for a unified aviation UAP reporting stream, citing its existing legal protections for reporters and its established trust with the pilot community. The core argument is that stigma functionally suppresses the data: pilots avoid reporting anomalous encounters to avoid career consequences, meaning the observable sample is systematically undercounted. Co-author Ryan Graves later cited this framework in his July 2023 Congressional testimony as the actionable legislative solution, giving the paper direct influence on the public policy record.
Metadata
- Category
- Phenomenon
- Venue
- AIAA AVIATION Forum 2023
- Type
- Conference proceedings
- Year
- 2023
- Authors
- Martin Snow, John M. Platte, John-Michael Gutierrez, Ted Roe, Ryan Graves
- Access
- Paywalled
- Programs
- NASA ASRS, NARCAP, Americans for Safe Aerospace
- Data sources
- NUFORC, FAA incident reports, NARCAP archive
- Tags
- UAP-aviation-safety, reporting-infrastructure, stigma, policy, technosignature-adjacent
Key points
- NASA's ASRS, already accepted by the FAA and trusted by commercial and military pilots as a confidential near-miss reporting system, is proposed as the single intake point for aviation UAP reports, avoiding the need to build a new parallel infrastructure.p.2
- Stigma is identified as the primary structural barrier to data collection: pilots risk professional and reputational consequences when reporting anomalous encounters, causing systematic underreporting that corrupts any downstream safety or scientific analysis.p.3
- The current reporting environment is fragmented across at least four non-interoperable channels, FAA, DoD, NASA, and civilian databases, with no standardized data fields, no mandatory collection, and no feedback loop to reporters.p.3
- The paper proposes standardized minimum data fields for UAP aviation reports, analogous to ASRS's existing near-miss taxonomy, to enable aggregation and longitudinal analysis across incidents.p.5
- Co-author Ted Roe brings NARCAP's two-decade archive of aviation anomaly reports as evidence that the problem predates recent Pentagon disclosures and that pilot sightings cluster in predictable airspace corridors.p.4
- Ryan Graves, a former F/A-18 pilot and founder of Americans for Safe Aerospace, cited this paper's ASRS framework in his July 2023 House Oversight Committee testimony, translating its recommendations directly into the legislative record.p.1
Most interesting
- ASRS already grants reporters immunity from FAA enforcement action under 14 CFR Part 91, a legal protection that would extend to UAP reporters if the system were adopted, removing the regulatory deterrent that currently suppresses disclosure.
- Ryan Graves has stated publicly that during his active F/A-18 service, UAP were observed almost daily in restricted airspace off the U.S. East Coast for years, yet none of those incidents entered any formal safety reporting pipeline.
- NARCAP (co-author Ted Roe's organization) has collected aviation anomaly reports since 1999, predating AATIP and the 2017 New York Times disclosures by nearly two decades, yet its data remains outside official FAA or DoD systems.
- The AIAA, the world's largest aerospace professional society, hosting this paper signals institutional legitimacy: UAP data reform is being argued from an aeronautical engineering and air-safety framework, not a paranormal or ufology one.
- The paper implicitly treats UAP as an ongoing, unresolved air-safety hazard rather than a historical curiosity, framing the absence of a reporting system as an active deficiency with consequences comparable to gaps in bird-strike or drone-incursion reporting.