The Intelligence Community Must Move Beyond ‘Unidentified’ When It Comes To The UAP Conversation
Written by Justin Scott Snead - 11 March 2022
The U.S. intelligence community should apply its own Analytic Standards to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) identification.
It is time to make the leap from ‘Unidentified’ to ‘Nonhuman’ assumptions, measured on the standard scale from remote and improbable to probable and certain.
Be on the lookout for any shifts of language in how the government categorizes UAP sightings.
Photo by Jake Weirick on Unsplash
Nomenclature is used to make things known, but names can also be used to conceal, to stop certain conversations in their tracks.
When Juliet asks Romeo, “‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy….what’s in a name?” it is because his family name is the barrier keeping them apart.
Let’s recast the play. Romeo is the ‘Unidentified’/‘Other’- branded UAP speaking to his soulmate, Disclosure:
“By a name
I know not how to tell thee who I am:
My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,
Because it is an enemy to thee
Had I it written, I would tear the word.”
We may need to tear the name ‘Unidentified’ off the pages of government UAP reports if we ever hope to solve the UAP mystery. The intelligence community already has more descriptive words at hand.
The U.S. military and intelligence agencies, which have studied UAP since they began to appear in our skies in large numbers in 1947, have used ‘Unidentified’ to avoid having to define the true nature of this phenomenon. For over 70 years, government analysts have consistently taken nonhuman explanations off the table.
The current policy on identifying UAP was laid out in June 2021 when the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) released the Preliminary Assessment regarding Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. It said UAP that do not conform to conventional explanations will be labelled “Other” and that these may likely “remain unidentified” because we lack the “additional scientific knowledge to successfully collect on, analyze and characterize” their observed capabilities, which are contrary to known physics.
DNI Avril Haines publicly reiterated this policy when Washington Post reporter David Ignatius asked her about it in November 2021. She explained that “we were not going to be able to characterize every single one of these reports… because frankly we were not able to understand everything about it.” Haines added: “we’re going to have to wait for [NASA and private industry] science work I think to actually reveal some of these additional possibilities.”
Those additional possibilities that shall not be named are the nonhuman origins of UAP technology.
Some of our elected leaders are already practicing lines that might advance the conversation beyond ‘Unidentified.’
In his 60 Minutes interview from May 2021, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida called for answers about UAP even if they prove to be unconventional: “I want us to have a process to analyze the data every time it comes in … until we get some answers. Maybe it has a very simple answer. Maybe it doesn't.”
Representative Andre Carson of Indiana recently went further: “If it is otherworldly we will have internal controls in place to protect us and to engage, in the event that that happens, in a healthy and safe way.”
These are important words, but it seems that the government’s official intelligence products are going to stop at ‘unidentified’ and decline to make any judgments about what UAP might be--at least for now.
As we saw in the Blue Book era, so long as the Intelligence Community (IC) is unwilling to consider nonhuman possibilities their analysis will always be inconclusive, and the public’s awareness of the topic will remain stuck where it is.
Case in point. In April 2020, the Department of Defense released the official video clips of three UAP, nicknamed FLIR, GOFAST and GIMBAL, which had been in circulation online and in the media for a few years. The press release for the videos confirmed they were “indeed recordings made by naval aviators” and that “the aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified.’” To tamp down any speculation that this meant anything significant, the press release states: “DOD is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on… whether or not there is more to the videos.” We know from the accounts of the aviators and sailors who interacted with these UAP there is much more to the videos than that.
Now imagine if one of the UAP videos that is rumored to have the visual quality of a modern science-fiction movie was also officially released and accompanied with a similarly banal press release, saying in effect: This is a real Navy video, and we have no idea what it is.
A statement of avowed cluelessness would allow for such a wide array of potential explanations, would spread such a fog of uncertainty about the nature of the images, that the average viewer could discount it. Many would throw up their hands and think to themselves, it’s an interesting mystery, but it’s probably not what the UFO people think it is.
So long as the unidentified category is the final word on what UAP are, even the strongest evidence might not be strong enough to overcome it. UAP disclosure will be a dead letter if all that is ever disclosed will be categorized as merely unidentified. To quote another Shakespeare play, that is a step on which we must fall down, or else o'erleap, for in our way it lies.
A Better Way: the IC’s Analytic Standards
‘Unidentified’ is not how intelligence assessments work for any other topic. When North Korea rolls out a new missile that the IC has never seen before, analysts studying satellite pictures do not scratch their heads and declare they have no idea what that is. They would not say, “Maybe one day if Kim Jong-un ever shoots one across the ocean and it lands in California we will be able to offer a more informed opinion.” That analyst would be fired on the spot. Instead, they produce an intelligence assessment with conclusions presented in degrees of certainty.
The IC uses a set of nine standards that dictate how members should analyze intelligence data and report conclusions. The Analytic Tradecraft Standards are “the core principles of intelligence analysis and are to be applied across the IC.” (Remember that word tradecraft.) They are established by an Intelligence Community Directive, the most recent version was issued by the DNI in 2015.
Government UAP reports going back to the first ones in 1948 are strewn with warnings against assumptions and speculation. The current approach is to make zero assumptions about what might explain UAP unconventional flight characteristics. It is ‘Other’ and nothing more. And yet, according to the standards, assumptions and judgements are an integral part of intelligence work. Assumptions are necessary to “frame or support an argument” which will aid the “interpretation of underlying intelligence information.” Without assumptions, evidence can become undecipherable. As we have seen with UFOs, hard-to-explain evidence tends to get ignored.
One of the most basic standards is a requirement that an analyst must actually make a definitive judgment call. This standard states that an analysis product “should present all judgements that would be useful to customers, and should not avoid difficult judgements in order to minimize the risk of being wrong.” Furthermore, the analyst “should express judgements as clearly and precisely as possible, reducing ambiguity by addressing the likelihood, timing, and nature” of the event in question. There is no provision in this standard for avoiding judgments or ignoring evidence because it might sound crazy, upset someone, or open up a difficult conversation.
Not only must these judgments be drawn, they must be presented with great clarity: “Analytic products should present a clear main analytic message up front… Language and syntax should convey meaning unambiguously.” The way the UAP Report defines ‘Other’ is the very model of ambiguity and tortured syntax.
The standard that stipulates the analysis of alternatives deserves to be quoted in full (with emphasis added) because it directly addresses some of the challenges related to UAP events:
Analysis of alternatives is the systematic evaluation of differing hypotheses to explain events or phenomena, explore near-term outcomes, and imagine possible futures to mitigate surprise and risk. Analytic products should identify and assess plausible alternative hypotheses. This is particularly important when major judgements must contend with significant uncertainties, or complexity,... or when low probability events could produce high-impact results.
The UAP Report, like the old ‘saucer’ reports that came before it, stresses that it cannot possibly make a judgment because of unnamed uncertainties related to “science.” It also declines to offer differing hypotheses for what might explain UAP data. And it seems blithely unconcerned with UAP’s unique potential to pose future surprise and risk. All of this is contrary to IC analytic tradecraft.
The most useful standard for the purpose of categorizing UAP events is one that stipulates how analysts should express the degree of likelihood that their judgments are correct. It states:
“Analytic products should indicate and explain the basis for the uncertainties associated with major analytic judgments, specifically the likelihood of occurrence of an event or development, and the analyst’s confidence in the basis for this judgment.”
The document includes terminology in this helpful scale:
Before we look at how these standards might be used to positively identify UAP, let’s go back to the DNI.
David Ignatius seemed to be referring to the Analytic Tradecraft Standards when he asked DNI Haines this question: “I’d love to hear your comments about what the tradecraft of UAP detection is, how we’ll know what we know, how would we know if we were being observed, for example…. What is the tradecraft?” I once called this a softball question. In fact, it is the most important question about UAP one could ask the DNI, and it snared a revealing answer.
Haines’s answer recounts many of the principles outlined in the analytic standards:
The tradecraft isn’t any different for Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon than it is for the rest of our work in the intelligence community… We collect all of the information we can through a variety of different sensors, people are reporting things, we’re picking up things technically, we’re doing a variety of work to try to understand what it is we are seeing. We are then taking other information that we have to determine is it something that we know about in that area, is there some other reporting that we might not normally think of as being connected, and then we do our analysis as we normally would to … put it into context, what are the likely possible options, how do we characterize it, bucket it, and think about it. All of that is the standard way. But it doesn't mean that we are definitely going to be able to tell if we are being observed under the circumstance.
They follow the standards until they don’t. Based on Haines’s answer, which reiterated the UAP Report, it appears that the typical current UAP analytic product says something like this: It is “very likely” or “almost certain” that the observed UAP is not airborne clutter or adversarial technology or a secret project. At that point, the analysis seems to stop, and the UAP event is dropped into the analytical black hole that the report calls “a catchall ‘other’ bin.”
Moving Beyond Other
How could these analytic standards be used to help us understand UAP beyond merely calling them ‘Other’? What is missing is an analytic framework that allows for assumptions and judgments about what UAP actually are. One with categories and questions that meaningfully grapple with the available evidence from a UAP event. It could look something like this:
Four Assumptions about UAP categorized as Other
Nonhuman Technology: Based on observed features and capabilities, what is the likelihood the UAP constitutes technology no human individual or group possesses?
Intelligently Controlled: What is the likelihood the UAP is intelligently controlled?
Point of Origin & Departure: What are the most likely locations where the UAP entered and exited the observed event?
Mission Objectives: Assuming the UAP was intelligently controlled, what is the most likely purpose of its activities during the event?
IC certainty about each of these assumptions would be measured on the standard scale from remote and improbable to probable and certain.
Applying the IC’s analytic standards to the above approach would allow for a much more fruitful conversation about the unidentified craft in our skies, while also minimizing any wild speculation about Little Green Men. No one would have set up to the podium and declared, “Yep, that is an alien spaceship from Zeti Reticuli.” But they would have to say, “Our best analysis of the evidence indicates that the UAP very likely represents nonhuman technology not originating from anywhere on Earth.”
If such intelligence products already exist, they should be shared with elected leaders. At that point, those leaders need to share these conclusions with the public in the same way politicians have always shared IC conclusions in matters of war and peace.
Of course, this answer is not going to be as easy as pulling the Analytic Standards off the shelf and pointing at them. Making the leap from ‘Unidentified’ to ‘Nonhuman’ is harrowing, and bound to produce some vertigo for anyone teetering on that particular ledge. There are deep institutional, historical, political, and psychological reasons to stay safely on one side. To overcome those reasons, the IC is going to have to take a leap of faith. Faith in the new world they would help to open. Faith that it’s the right thing to do. Faith in their duty to the truth.
If they cannot make the leap on their own, there is another way to get across: a swift kick from Congress.
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