UAP in Crowded Skies: Atmospheric and Orbital Threat Reduction in an Age of Geopolitical Uncertainty

Brief

Treating UAP as a behavioral 'black box' and invoking William James's 'radical empiricism' as its methodological scaffold, this 62-page white paper examines how existing international regimes, the 1944 Chicago Convention, ICAO, and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, are structurally ill-equipped to handle UAP alongside drones, hypersonic missiles, and commercial spacecraft. The 2021 ODNI task force report covering 144 military UAP cases (80 involving multiple sensors) could attribute only one case and ruled out significant classified Russian, Chinese, and US aerospace technologies, while flagging apparent advanced technology in 21 reports. The paper makes three tiered recommendations: an ICAO annex mandating civilian and military UAP reporting, a UN COPUOS working group for orbital data-sharing, and bilateral or multilateral military C3I upgrades to prevent UAP-triggered escalation to conventional or nuclear conflict. Because great-power distrust makes all three infeasible in the near term, the paper proposes a supranational civil-society UAP research organization as a trust-building precursor.

Metadata

Category

Hub & Overview

Venue

Sol Foundation

Type

White paper

Year

2024

Authors

The Sol Foundation

Access

Open access

Length

1.4 M

Programs

Sol Foundation, All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), UAP Task Force (ODNI), International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATAIP)

Data sources

ODNI UAP Task Force Unclassified Report (June 2021), USS Nimitz UAP footage (2004), USS Theodore Roosevelt UAP footage (2015), DOD annual UAP reporting (AARO)

Tags

UAP-policy, airspace-safety, orbital-security, geopolitics, deconfliction, nuclear-risk, international-law

Key points

• The 2021 ODNI UAP Task Force report analyzed 144 military aviator reports (80 involving multiple sensors), could find no attributable cause for all but one case, ruled out significant classified Russian, Chinese, and US aerospace technologies, and flagged apparent advanced technology in 21 reports.p.8
• On April 27, 2020, the Pentagon confirmed the authenticity of three US Navy videos captured in 2004 and 2015 showing objects with exceptional speed and/or maneuverability, the 2004 USS Nimitz incident and 2015 USS Theodore Roosevelt encounters.p.8
• Schumer's UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, designed with a presidentially backed panel of cleared academics and retired officials, failed to pass in its original form; only a 'significantly stripped-down version, unrecognizable to its authors,' was included in the 2024 NDAA.p.9
• The paper's three core recommendations are: (1) an ICAO annex to the Chicago Convention with binding UAP reporting obligations; (2) a UN COPUOS UAP working group for orbital data-sharing; (3) military-to-military measures including C3I upgrades for UAP discrimination, adjusted nuclear submarine patrol patterns, and integration of UAP scenarios into nuclear command exercises.p.6
• The paper adopts William James's 'radical empiricism' as its explicit methodological framework, directing analysts to assess directly observable UAP attributes (shapes, movement, environmental interactions) while bracketing ontological questions about what UAP fundamentally are.p.13
• UAP event frequency is estimated at thousands per year by civilian reporting and approximately 100 per year according to official DOD statements, occurring against a backdrop of geopolitical mistrust, insufficient regulatory capacity, and airspace crowded with drones, surveillance balloons, and hypersonic missiles.p.12
• Congress passed no fewer than eight NDAA and Intelligence Authorization Act amendments on UAP between fiscal years 2022 and 2024, establishing AARO as a standing DOD research office required to issue annual congressional reports.p.8
• The paper tentatively proposes 'nonanthropogenic vehicle (NAV)' as a candidate replacement term for UAP, pending research findings sufficient to confirm its validity.p.7

Most interesting

• The paper explicitly floats 'nonanthropogenic vehicle (NAV)' as a future successor term to 'UAP', a framing that presupposes non-human manufacture without yet claiming to confirm it.
• The authors draw a direct structural analogy between UAP policy planning and Cold War nuclear deterrence modeling: because global nuclear war has never occurred yet is the most heavily modeled scenario among nation-states, a UAP threat that has never fully materialized still warrants comparable contingency architecture.
• The paper notes that unlike the Cold War, when the US and USSR built nuclear hotlines, sea-incident protocols, and anti-satellite weapon prohibitions, the last decade has seen states increasingly violate airspace norms outright, removing the de-escalation infrastructure that previously bounded aerospace incidents.
• The 2017 NYT report on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATAIP) is identified as the watershed moment triggering six years of accelerating congressional and DOD engagement, with the May 17, 2022 House hearing described as the first congressional UAP hearing in over 50 years.
• The paper treats UAP stigma as a measurable policy distortion: professional marginalization 'skewers the risk-benefit analysis for potential researchers considering entering the field,' functioning as a structural brake on scientific supply.
• The proposed supranational civil-society UAP research organization, drawing on scientists, amateur astronomers, and aviators, is framed not as an end goal but as a neofunctionalist 'spillover' mechanism to rebuild interstate trust before any binding state-level or military-to-military agreements become politically feasible.