Boone, Carlin toner, Josh sometta and Jennifer bus. When in the front row, we have Walter Scott Warren Randolph, Reggie brothers, Shelly right. Scott Kelly, Anna Maria Maria, Mike gold, and David Spergel, who serves as chair of the team. I have a few opening remarks. But to begin, I'd like to start with the following. First, I'd like to pay tribute to the life of retired Air Force Master Sergeant Sam Satow, who's being laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery today. Following his active duty service, Sam served as the intelligence collection manager for the National Intelligence manager for aviation, where he played a critical role in UAP analysis. All of us at NASA offer our condolences to sounds, family, friends and colleagues. Second, I'd like to take this opportunity to express my profound gratitude to our distinguished panel of experts for their unwavering commitment and dedication. it's disheartening to note that several of them have been subjected to online abuse due to their decision to participate on this panel. And NASA security team is actively addressing this issue. We at NASA are acutely aware of the considerable public interest in UAP. However, it's critical to understand any form of harassment towards our panelists only serves to detract from the scientific process, which requires an environment of respect and openness. Now, every member of our team is a recognized authority in their respective field and they have our unequivocal support. NASA stands in solidarity with them, advocating for a respectful discourse that fits their expertise and the significance of their work. Thanks. Now, in recent years, the subject of unidentified aerial phenomena nowadays termed on identify anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, has captured the attention of the public, the scientific community and the government alike. And it's now our collective responsibility to investigate these occurrences with a rigorous scientific scrutiny that they deserve. NASA Administrator, Senator Bill Nelson believes that understanding UAPs is vital for several reasons, which is why he directed this study. First and foremost, it provides an opportunity for us to expand our understanding of the world around us. It's an organization dedicated to exploring the unknown, this work is in our DNA. Secondly, this study aims to enhance situational awareness. The presence of UAPs raises concerns about the safety of our skies. And it's this nation's obligation to determine whether these phenomena pose any potential risks to airspace safety. By understanding the nature of UAPs, we can ensure that our skies remain a safe space for all. In order to achieve these goals, it is crucial that we employ a scientific lens for our UAP work. It's precisely this rigorous, evidence based approach that allows one to separate fact from fiction. This team is comprised of experts from various disciplines, which allows them to approach this work from multiple perspective. And we have greatly benefited from that collective expertise. Now, why do we value a scientific approach? It's because science is built on evidence. It thrives on scrutiny. It demands we could see it reproduce, reproducibility report that you feel I can't sorry. And above all, objectivity when we approach UAPs. From a scientific perspective, we do not come in with an agenda, we come in needing a roadmap. Indeed, the primary objective of this incredible team of experts is not to go back and look at grainy footage of UAPs but rather to give us a roadmap to guide us for future analysis. And this is the very scientific method that NASA holds true to its heart. Scientific research is intended to be publicly available and transparent. And NASA prides itself on making its data and images available to the public to learn and explore on their own. By holding public meetings like this one, we aim for open and honest dialogue with the public. We recognize that public interest in UAPs is high, and that the demand for answers is strong. conversations like this one, are the first step to reducing the stigma surrounding UAP reporting. Moreover, transparency is essential for fostering trust between NASA, the public and the scientific community. In order to do things right, we must work together, pooling our resources, our knowledge and our expertise. And by maintaining open channels of communication, we can facilitate collaboration, encourage the exchange Change of ideas and ensure that our work is as robust as possible. Not only that, but our commitment to openness is in itself. A reflection of NASA's commitment to scientific integrity is an organization dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. It is NASA's responsibility to be honest and forthright and to follow the science. And by being transparent in our work, we uphold our dedication to scientific excellence. The meeting today represents the first deliberative actions that the team has taken. And so it's important to keep in mind that they still have several months of work ahead of them. Their final report will be released this summer, and we will publish it on our website. NASA beliefs, to the study of unidentified anomalous phenomena represents an exciting step forward in our quest to uncover the mysteries of the world around us. By embracing a scientific lens, we ensure that our work is rigorous and reliable. And by valuing transparency and openness, we can foster trust and collaboration with the public. Simply put, this is why we do what we do. Now, before I introduce Nicky, there are a few administrative matters to attend to. Firstly, the identified anomalous phenomena independent study team has been established in accordance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act, known as facto its parent committee is the Earth Science Advisory Committees. As such, this group does not report to the government. It reports to the Science Advisory Committee who debate the recommendations and formally transmit this team's report to the government. Next, our deliberative committee meetings such as this one are open to the public. And also after this panel was convened, the National Defense Authorization Act, known as the NDAA changed the A in UAP to be anomalous. Accordingly, this pals remit was expanded to encompass not just aerial UAP however, the majority of UAP sightings to date have been in the aerial domain. So it's fair to say that this panels focus is on the aerial aspect of anomalous. Now in compliance with a fact in fact, a federal statute former minutes have been taken throughout the meeting today, and these meetings and these minutes are for the public record, and hence, all presentations and discussions and comments by the committee members should be considered to be on the record. Each member of this UAP study team has been appointed because of their specific subject matter expertise as individuals, and hence each member is subject to federal ethics laws. This category of appointment is called special government employees or STS for our non government members, and our two federal employees serve as regular government employees known as IGS. To the panel, all members on this committee should remember to recuse themselves. If a topic comes up in which you have a potential conflict of interest between your financial interests, including those of your employer, and matters that were discussing. And then finally, panel. If you have any ethics questions, please see me separately and if needed, I'll put you in contact with a NASA ethics attorney. Thanks for bearing with me. I'd now like to turn to the amazing Dr. Nikki Fox, Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Oh, do you Nikki?
Thank you, Dan. And thank you to all the members of NASA's UAP independent study team. Your selfless dedication to the pursuit of knowledge is just so commendable. And I want to thank you, the audience for tuning in today to watch our first deliberative meeting of NASA's independent study team on evaluating and categorizing on identified anomalous phenomena. Before I begin, though, I really do want to double down on Dan's words, that it is really disheartening to hear of the harassment that our panelists have faced online. All because they're studying this topic now stands behind our panelists and we do not tolerate abuse. Harassment only leads to further stigmatization of the UAP field, significantly hindering the scientific progress and discouraging others to study this important subject matter. Your harassment also obstructs the public's right to knowledge. Our panelists are leading experts in the scientific aeronautics and data analytics communities. We are very lucky to have them on board to share their invaluable insights to inform NASA on what possible data could be collected in the future, and how it can be collected to help us better understand the nature of UAP. The UAP independent study was commissioned to create a roadmap on how to use the tools of science to evaluate and categorize the nature of UAPs going forward. This roadmap of course will help the federal government obtain US Double data to explain the nature of future UAPs transparency, openness and scientific integrity or Pinnacle to NASA's mission. They're at the forefront of this public meeting, and have been throughout the team seven months on this study. As Dan noted, this is a working meeting and so the public will have the incredible opportunity to witness the process of science in action. At NASA, we lead the world in exploration and are committed to rigorous scientific inquiry. The nature of science is to better understand the unknown. And to do that are scientists need data. Right now there is very limited number of high quality observations and data curation of UAP. The existing data available from eyewitness reports are often muddled and cannot provide conclusive evidence that supports UAP recognition and analysis. Additionally, an object's background can complicate the data further and render it unusable due to conventional objects that can mimic or overshadow the phenomena completely, such as commercial aircraft, military equipment, the weather, and ionospheric phenomena like auroras. This lack of high quality data make it impossible to draw scientific conclusions on the nature of UAP. Now, this team has used unclassified data from civilian government entities, commercial data, and data from other sources to inform their recommendations. And as Dan noted, they will be published in a public report that comes out this summer. I want to emphasize that there is really great benefit to studying unclassified data rather than classified data for this study. First, unidentified anomalous phenomena sightings themselves are not classified, it's often the sensor platform that is classified and you can kind of think of it, if a fighter jet took a picture of the Statue of Liberty, then that image would be classified not because of the subject in the picture, but because of the sensors on the plane. Second, unclassified data that make it possible for our team to communicate openly, to advance our understanding of UAP, not only with each other, but across the scientific community and to the public. This ensures a clear and transparent pipeline of information that can be built upon through the generous through generations to expand our understanding. This study relies on open data, everything we use at NASA is open, and anyone can look at these records. So I invite you to visit our open data dot nasa.gov, to comb through our 10s of 1000s of datasets that are free and fully accessible to the public. Additionally, please check out data.gov/open/data for a great overview of where you can find the archives for our science and mission data sites. I am very, very much looking forward to hearing the deliberations put forth today from our distinguished panel of experts. Thank you so much for being here.
Before you go, I just want to open up to questions. Let me start with a question on this. On the NASA data. I think one of the important things that we'll be looking at with other datasets and events is the data is not very well calibrated. Can you say just a little bit about how NASA goes through calibrating some of its our science data?
Oh, yes, we are very, very rigorous. Earth's I mean, all of our datasets, not just Earth Science go through extremely rigorous calibration. We don't release anything until it's really perfect. I mean, we have quick look data that is marked as quick look data. So you know, you can use it to get preliminary findings, but wait for the the really nicely cleaned up data. So a lot of rigorous protocol in putting out our data to make sure it is perfect.
Do we have any other questions from the panel?
All right, thank you so much.
Hi, I'm David Spergel. I'm the chair of the panel. And when they look at our chart, we have a lengthy charge, but the high level summary of it is how can NASA contribute to understanding the nature of UAPs. And our role here is not to resolve the nature of these events, but rather to give NASA guidance to provide a roadmap of how they can contribute in this in this area. After my opening remarks, we'll hear from Sean Kirkpatrick from the AAR. Oh, And it's the ARL that's charged with leading the whole of government UAP effort. And they've already issued some preliminary reports on some of the events. NASA's role is to use its unique capabilities. And its role as a civilian agency, interacting with the scientific community in an open and transparent manner. And, you know, as Dr. Fox emphasize the defense and intelligence agency data on UAP are often classified primarily because of how the data is collected, not because what's in the data. For camera on an F 35 took a picture of a bird. It's classified. If a spy satellite takes an image of a balloon. And we've had in the news, some balloons recently, that date is classified. And that's because of a desire to not reveal our technical capabilities to other nations. NASA, on the other hand, operates in a mode where it's collecting data in the open. And the NASA data is available on websites and is well characterized. And because of NASA being the civilian agency studying air and space, it has a special role to play. And I see our charge primarily as helping identify for NASA ways it could play that role, and contribute to understanding. We've gone through a preliminary data collection stage. And to summarize some of the things that we've learned. The current data collection efforts regarding UAPs are unsystematic and fragmented across various agencies, often using instruments uncalibrated for scientific data collection. And if I think about the data that people have out there, it's in many ways what we'd like to think of as citizen science. But again, it is uncalibrated data, poorly characterized, not well curated, and we face looking through the Stata, a significant background, a background of many of these events are commercial aircraft, civilian American military, drones, weather and research balloons, military equipment, ionospheric phenomenon, we need to characterize how, what the date when the date is taken, when it sees events like this first. The current existing data and eyewitness reports alone are insufficient to provide conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of of every UAP event. They're often informed uninformative, due to lack of quality control, and data curation. To understand UAP better, targeted data collection, thorough data curation, and robust analyses are needed. Such an approach will help to discern unexplained UAP sightings. But even then there's no guarantee that all sightings will be explained. Another challenge in this area is what we call stigma, there's a real stigma among people reporting events. And despite NASA's extensive efforts to reduce the stigma, the origin of the UAP is remain unclear. And we feel many events remain unreported. commercial pilots, for example, are very reluctant to report anomalies. And one of our goals in having NASA play a role is to remove stigma, and get high quality data. In fact, if I were to summarize, in one line, what I feel we've learned it, we need high quality data. And this is not some as a research scientist whose work has been primarily focused in cosmology. I would say the lesson of my career has been, you want to address important questions, you need high quality data with well calibrated instruments. So the let me now introduce the agenda, we're going to hear from a number of experts who will be presenting up to lunch will then break at 12 for lunch from 12 to 1230. At 1230, we'll resume and we'll have presentations by members of the panel on some preliminary ideas for discussion. And that will be a period of time for some open discussion by the panel. We will then have a q&a session based on questions that have been sent in in advance to the website and we've curated those questions and group them together and we'll be going through a lot of those questions. And then we'll summarize. And then over the subsequent couple months, we'll work on putting together the report. And as Dan said, we're aiming to make a public report available, we hope by the end of July. So now let me turn this over to Sean Kilpatrick.
We'll do a couple of q&a. q&a from him. Okay. From the panel.
Any any questions on the panel? Thoughts? Yes, we'll get the mic.
Yeah, so one of the things I think Dr. Fox said was looking at the release of data very important for our study, when it's high quality. And you have also commented that data are not always perfect, when we're doing certain studies, I wonder if you could shed some light on the, you know, the difference between the application of certain data to certain scientific challenges.
So, you know, when you look at your camera, your camera is often designed to take an image in the daytime, and might not be optimized for nighttime imaging. Or if you take something that astronomers are very familiar with, is we design our telescopes to work at night. And if the sun is not even if you're, you know, you would never take the Hubble telescope and pointed at the sun, this would destroy it detectors. Not only that, if the telescope is pointing there, and the sun is over there, even though you're not looking at the sun, reflections off of the optics will produce what we call ghosting. And that kind of ghosting gets produces some very strange images. And this, you know, one of the many things we need to worry about when we see unusual things taken from a camera is, even if you're pointing the camera, there was the sun over there. Those kinds of anomalies degrade the quality of the data. And that's why it's very important to work with well characterized instruments, and to be, you know, using them in ways in which you, you understand what's going on. So I think if you look at, you know, data taken from the James Webb Telescope, or from the Hubble or these things, and these are, you know, telescopes looking out in space, you'll see some really, you know, at first funny phenomenon, when a telescope points at a star that's bright, it saturates the detector, and puts bleeding down the detector. And you'll see phenomenon like, if there's a bright store, off to the side of the dark, that not even one you're looking at, you get this effects where light bounces off of dust in your telescope, and produces a sort of diffuse image that has some really strange properties. So you know, when you see something unusual, the first thing you have to do is understand how that data was taken. And I think this is one of the challenges one faces when you have data taken by uncalibrated instruments years ago, it's very hard to know what to take. And it's very hard to draw conclusions. I think that's one of the challenges with archival data. And I think having dedicated well calibrated instruments, I think will be important here is in any other area to understand what's going on.
So, David, anomalies are so often the engine of discovery, maybe you can say a quick word about high risk, high reward research in your field of cosmology, and how you see that impacting the UAP study as well.
So an area that comes to mind is on fast radio bursts. And shore prize was just announced yesterday, and was awarded to the discovery of Fast radio bursts. And these are these bursting signals that go off all over in space. And it's an interesting story, because some of the bursts were real, and are phonetic, fascinating. And some of the bursts. There was a series of bursts observed by this observatory in Australia. And they had really stuck range structure. And people couldn't figure out what was going on. And then they started to notice a lot of them bunched together around lunchtime. And what had happened was, the people at the observatory would heat up their lunch in the microwave. And something they would do is they would open the door of the microwave oven before the microwave stopped. This is bad for your microwave oven. It wears it out. But not only that, it produced a burst of radio signal that was picked up by the sensitive detectors. So this, I think it's an interesting lesson. Some events end up being something unusual and conventional. But some events with these FRPs turn out to be these powerful explosions, which are taking place at cosmological distances, their nature still not fully understood. I think they're one of the really most fascinating objects, we have these bursts going out all over space. They're interesting probes, because they're kind of waiting up space between here and there. And they're a subject of a reactive research. And if you don't one looks at the history of these FRBs. At first, they were discovered not believed and can finally confirmed, and they were discovered by instruments that were very sensitive, but not optimized for this. And now what we're doing is we're optimizing instruments and optimizing software to look for these events. And it's often these surprises that turned out to be most interesting. And you know, there are phenomenon, like sprites, which you can think of as upward going lightning, which were seen by commercial pilots, and somewhat not believed, right, because they were very strange. And, and it was really only when we were able to take very high speed imaging data, data taken off, and from places like Space Station, that were able to see that and learn about these fascinating ionospheric phenomenon. So it's surprises are really interesting. I mean, I think this is one of the fascinating things about the UAP phenomenon, if it's something that's anomalous, that makes it interesting and worthy of study. Other questions? Great. So now, let me turn it over to Sean.
Thank you, David. And it's pleasure to be back. Good morning, everyone. I want to start by thanking NASA for convening today's UAP independent study public meeting, and inviting me to continue to participate. NASA has been an invaluable partner to our team at Arrow as we work to better understand and respond to unidentified anomalous phenomena. We applaud NASA for commissioning its independent study team and for exploring what data and tools could be leveraged to shed greater light on UAP. Though NASA and arrow are taking on very different aspects of the UAP problem set, our efforts are very much complimentary. We both are committed to the scientific method to a data driven approach, and the highest standards of scientific research integrity. While NASA is evaluating unclassified data sources for its study, arrows dataset includes classified material, with a focus on national security areas. However, all of this data collectively, is critical to understanding the nature and origin of UAP. NASA brings unique capabilities world class scientists, and a wealth of academic and research linkages. NASA also has access to our sensing satellites, radiological sensors, tools for gravitational wave geomagnetic wave detection and means for analyzing open source clutter and crowdsource data that may assist both arrow and NASA in their UAP efforts. We are very grateful for the partnership and welcome the opportunity to join with NASA to share our collective findings with the public as the US government moves towards greater transparency on this issue. Last month, I testified before members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on emerging threats and capabilities, and shared some of the progress made since Arrow's establishment in July 2022. I discussed arrows scientific analytic approaches its efforts to improve UAP data collection, standardize our reporting processes, leverage our partnerships and meticulously review the US government's UAP related historical records. As I told the subcommittee then, the resolution of all UAP cases cannot be accomplished by DOD and the intelligence community alone. eras ultimate success will require partnerships with the interagency industry, academia, the scientific community, and the public, which all bring their own resources, ideas and expertise to the UAP challenge. We believe robust collaboration and peer review, across a broad range of partners will promote greater objectivity and transparency in the study of UAP. Of course, NASA's UAP independent study team was convened very much in that spirit. I also emphasize to Congress that the only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as anomalous. The majority of unidentified objects reported to arrow and in our holdings demonstrate mundane characteristics of readily explainable sources. While a large number of cases and arrows holdings remain technically unresolved, this is primarily due to a lack of data associated with those cases, very much along the lines of what David was just speaking about. Without sufficient data, we are unable to reach defendable conclusions that meet the high scientific standards we set for resolution. Meanwhile, for the few objects that do demonstrate potentially anomalous characteristics, arrows approaching these cases with the highest level of objectivity and analytic rigor. This includes physical testing and employing modeling and simulation to validate our analyses and the underlying theories, and then peer reviewing those results before reaching any conclusions. Arrow has shared these cases with the appropriately cleared NASA team members in order to discuss and help recommend potential scientific areas of study that NASA may want to take lead on. I'll underscore here as I did before Congress that arrows work will take time, if we are committed to doing it right. Arrow is committed to the highest standards of scientific research integrity. As we know, our partners at NASA are as well. Thanks again to NASA for hosting this public forum for UAP discussion and information exchange. And I'd like to turn to a brief presentation that includes some recently declassified footage and trends for discussion. Next slide, please. So some of you probably saw a version of this at the open hearing last month. This is an overall review of all the analytic trends of all the cases that we have to date. While the numbers may have changed a little bit. The overall trends remained the same. Most of what we are seeing reported by aircraft are at the altitudes where we fly aircraft, that should not be a surprise. You will note however, that I have no space reports, and I have no maritime reports. That is notable even though we are looking across all of those domains. On the upper right, we have UAP morphologies, the vast majority of what has been reported and what we have data on little less than half now are orbs round spheres. And in the bottom right, you will see in the really the heat map of the areas where we get most of our reporting. This is very much a collection biased map. This is where our sensors are our military, and Ric and some of the FAA data in the middle, which is what we call our typical UAP characteristics for the vast majority of the cases that we see. One way of looking at that is a they call it a target package. This is the thing we are out hunting for in most cases. Next slide please. This was an example of one that I showed at the hearing recently. This is a spherical or metallic in the Middle East 2022 by an MQ nine. I will come back to the sensor question that David raised here in a moment. This is a typical example of the thing that we see most of we see these all over the world and we see these in and making very interesting apparent maneuvers. This one in particular However, I would point out demonstrated no enigmatic technical capabilities, and was no threat to airborne safety. While we are still looking at it, I don't have any more data other than that. And so being able to come to some conclusion is going to take time, until we can get better resolve data on similar objects that we can then do a larger analysis on. Next slide, please. I'm gonna let this play through. This is a newly released video, you'll notice there are two dots moving back and forth, there is a plane at the bottom that's moving across the screen. And now there are three dots moving back and forth. The moving back and forth, is from the sensor and the platform that's collecting it. This is a a p3 on a training mission in the western United States. They picked these up and they tried to intercept and was unable to intercept them. Apart from that motion, and you'll see a little bit of defocusing from the sensor itself. There is no other oddity about this, except for the fact that they couldn't catch them. The reason they couldn't catch them is because after further analysis, it was shown that those objects were actually much farther away from the p3 than they thought. And in fact, when we went even deeper looked at air traffic control data, we were able to match those two aircraft on a major flight corridor heading into a major airport for landing. This is the kind of thing that can spoof and or provide misperception of both very highly trained pilots, as well as sensors. Right, and this was reported as an odd grouping of three UAP. That is not to say that the pilots didn't know what they were looking at, or they, they knew what they were looking at, but they weren't really sure. But it also is meant to say that when they're not sure they're reporting it now, and that's what they're supposed to be doing. And then we have to go look at it. Next slide, please. That brings us to really what is arrow doing in the science and technical realm. So this is one of those areas that I want to expound a little bit more on than we did in the last hearings. Arrow has a robust scientific plan that we are required to then provide to Congress here pretty soon.
One of the first things that we're doing is looking across all the existing sensor data against that typical UAP target that I gave you up at the very first slide that goes beyond DOD and icy sensors that's commercial, that's civil, that's and with partnership with NASA, when NASA sensors, and NOAA sensors, understanding if any of these Earth sensing satellites, any of these airborne platforms, any of these ground radars, whether it's FAA or other can actually see these things. Given what we've got so far is going to be an important first step to understanding which sensors are going to be relevant. From there, we will we are augmenting with dedicated sensors that we've purpose built designed to detect, track and characterize those particular objects. We will be been putting those out in very select areas for surveillance purposes. Partnerships with academia exploring the signatures to match to our data. So understanding if a thing is moving and if it is doing certain anomalous activities, what are the signatures we would expect to see? How do we pull on that? And then from there, how do I tune my collection architecture to go after statistical analytic techniques? We're working with a couple of universities on how do I do broader base statistical analysis on unclassified and classified data so that I can apply those analytics to our holdings, and then AI and ML analytic techniques for searching out through the data. What are this? What are the objects? What are the targets that we're going after? We have partnerships with both DOD and Doa labs to explore our current state of the art fundamental physics of UAP observations, both current and historical. In other words, if I have objects, those few that are doing some things that are anomalous, what is our current understanding of maneuverability, speed, sinking, signature management, propulsion, what are those underlying signatures that we would expect to see and how do I then pull on that our interagency and allied partnership ships for calibration of our capabilities. This is exactly what David was pointing out. The vast majority of what we have reported to us are DoD sensors. DOD sensors are not scientific sensors. They are not intelligence community sensors. Believe it or not, intelligence community sensors are very close to scientific sensors, they are calibrated, they are high precision. They are everything you'd ever want to know about a thing. DOD sensors have one purpose they are to identify an object that is known and put a weapon on it. That is what they're for. Right, predominantly. So understanding how do you calibrate those against these known objects? How do I fly an F 35, against a weather balloon at different speeds in different altitudes and different sun conditions and different lighting conditions and heating conditions. Those are all important measurements that need to be done. And we are on the in process of doing that right now. That table on the right is a very simplified version of our entire test matrix, which you would not be able to fit on three of these slides against all of our sensors across all of those phenomenologies. That will be useful in order to then train our operators, pilots and sensors against the known objects. And then finally, our pattern of life analysis. This is essentially baselining, what is normal, I have all these hotspot areas, but we only have hotspot areas, because that's when the reports come in from the operators that are operating at that time. They don't operate all the time. So to have a 24/7 collection monitoring campaign, in some of these areas for three months at a time is going to be necessary in order to measure out what is normal, then I'll know what is not normal, right when we have additional things that come through those spaces. And that includes space and maritime. Next slide, please. Which brings me to some of my recommendations for the panel. And their consideration and deliberation. of some of these we're going to be exploring with our new NASA embed, and I'm happy to be welcoming on for your pretty soon who's going to help us in our scientific plan. Crowdsourcing unclassified open source of data, this is where you know some of the public can be helpful. You know, imagery from a iPhone is generally not helpful unless you are right up on whatever it is you're looking at. However, some of the ancillary data that your iPhone provides from location to speed to other phenomenologies and more than one of those can be very helpful. Large scale ground based scientific instrumentation evaluating how can I use some of these other instruments for detection? The FRB example was was perfect, right? You have a bunch of large scales, instruments that were not designed for that yet they pick them up because there was a microwave? Well, we have a a surrogate target package of what we think these things are, at least from a what we've got reported to us that was in the front slide. Understanding how can I evaluate that against all of these other instruments? And do any of them have a chance of picking anything up that would be helpful in tipping and cueing us to get other sensors on target? I think leading that evaluation of the scientific ground based sensors would be useful. Also the same thing for the earth sciences satellites, as we mentioned before. Intentional vice coincidental collection. So looking at how can I provide a tip and cue to both the ground and space based scientific and academic sensor community to put additional sensors on a object when it is reported? I'm currently doing that with arrow, the Joint Staff the commands for when they get tipped in queue. Right. So a pilot says something they see something they reported in, and we're going to turn on a whole bunch of new collection to go after it. I should be able to hand that same tip and cue to the scientific and academic community. So looking at how that works would be helpful. peer reviewing advanced capabilities, the parameterization and the publication of that that have not yet been engineered. We understand a lot of fundamental physics. It is the scientific community's responsibility to explore and document those fundamentals in peer reviewed scientific journals to match the data so that we can weed out all kinds of different hypotheses. Right? That's how science works, we need to make sure that we are doing that. I think leading that conversation would be very helpful from NASA's perspective, archived scientific data. So we have a whole bunch of calibrated large scale scientific data from all these different instrumentations around the world. Taking a look at how can you apply some maybe some AI ml tools to search through that data for anomalous signatures that may correlate to things that we've got reporting on? That would be an interesting study, distributions of sightings, I think this is a low hanging fruit one, right. So if we take a look at all of the distributions of sightings that are outside of my national security areas that I've got classified reporting for, and they generate the similar distribution map as we've gotten, and we put those two pieces together, now I have a holistic picture. And then, of course, our foreign partnerships, building a robust scientific community of interest review, data, capabilities, conduct analysis, expanding upon, you know, our military and intelligence collaborations across the world, into the scientific and academic world. And with that, those were my thoughts. We've talked about some of these in the past, it would be interesting to hear if there's any further questions or deliberations on any of those points. And I'm happy to take any questions that you all have.
Great. Thank you, Dr. Kirkpatrick. And I also want to you take this opportunity to thank you in the Aaro, for your openness, in providing this committee with insight and information about what you've learned so far, how we could work together, I think this is very much an area where it's going to be essential that NASA, be a partner and be a good partner for a row. And I think you're really want to thank you for your role with this committee, and helping to start to build that partnership. In my pleasure. And let's register.
Thanks to that place of Raven, quest question. We talked a little more data already, once about sensors for circuit. So you mentioned that you work with labs academia, do you see a need to go beyond what you mentioned earlier? That is the type of sensors that we have right now, which are based on national security threats and said phenomenologies and frequency range of these kinds of things. Do you see reasonable beyond that?
Absolutely. What
what are some challenges and see their materials?
So can we go back to the front slide, just the first slide where the target characterization is. So we've we've purpose built a couple of, of sensors to do search across that note, down one, there we go, that's great. But to go down some of those characteristics to see if we can find them correlated to pilot reporting. Some of those are initially this is going to be I'm gonna say this is a bootstrap method, right, we're doing a broad spectrum search, across very few indicators that we can point to, that will allow enable us to get a little bit more data, we're fine that narrow those sensors and go from there. So we aren't just relying on the DOD and icy sensors that exist today. Because frankly, they don't point to where we want them to point. Right. I mean, I'll be frank with with everyone. We we can point the largest collection apparatus in the entire globe, at any point we want. You just have to tell me where I want to point it. The second piece of that is a lot of what we have is, is around the continental United States. Most people including the government, don't like it when I point our entire collection apparatus to your backyard. Right? It's not allowed. We have some laws about that. And we've got to figure out how to do this only in the areas that that I can get high confidence there's going to be something there. And high confidence I'm not going to break any laws doing it. Right. So there's a there's a trade there. So some of these ground base point detectors are going to be necessary for that to point up to point out to search, coupled with we're evaluating a number of sensor opportunities across different organizations academic umea industry, whatnot that that already exist or are being built for similar purposes or maybe other purposes that I might be able to recalibrate for this and see if those will have a chance of of seeing that target. Right. So that's where the modeling and sim comes in, can I? Can I take that target, put it into your sensor, and have a chance of seeing it? If I can, then I might want to use
or you go,
Thanks, Shawn, I have the questions you probably don't want, which are about numbers, unless I missed them. During your presentation, you had said that only a very small percentage of your cases display signatures that could be anomalous, and then follow that up with a few objects that do demonstrate potentially anomalous characteristics. What numbers are we talking about? How big is your database? How many years? Was it collected over? And are those observations made? And then by few, what do you mean,
right? Now? That's a great question. So this chart, as I mentioned, we've updated with our current data holdings. At the time of my open hearing, we were at 650. Cases ish, we are now over 800. We are putting together our annual report, which will be due August one to the hill, and in it, and that will be an unclassified version, as there always has been, we will have those updated numbers at that time, we roughly get I mean, you can do the math, you know, it depends anywhere from from 50 to 100 ish new reports a month. Now, the reason we had such a big jump recently is because I got FAA data integrated in finally and so we ended up with like 100 and some odd new cases. So there's, there's reason why it's going to fluctuate the numbers that I would say, so we're gonna we're gonna try to do a little more fidelity on some of the analytics when we report out. But the numbers I would say that we see are possible, you really anomalous are less than single digit percentages of those, that total database, so maybe two to five ish percent. Right, who's next? All right.
I'll stand up because I'm on the other end of the room. Thanks, Shawn, for your presentation. And for the some of the video footage that we saw. While we're all good scientists on this panel, I think that I look at it with an untrained eye of looking at that video. And so I see three spots moving. And everything else in the background looks like it's stable. Can you talk a little bit more about either the sensor platform or what we're seeing that stable in the background? Because they've been identified as airplanes? And there's clear description of from other data sources that came in to help clarify that. But when I look at this, what are all of the white spots in the background that we're seeing that are stable?
So those are these that's a star background? Pretty sure that star background now, so you're looking at those planes were roughly 30 to 40 ish miles away, if I remember correctly, and when you see that smaller plane that comes in at the bottom. That one was much, much closer, it was like maybe six to 10 miles away. Right. And so the jitter in the sensor, is what you're looking at.
Right? Okay, so the three spots because they look like they're moving at about the same rate? They are, right, and if they were flying together, but they're not is what I'm hearing,
they're in the center, or in a flight line, right. So they're equally spaced in a flight line and the sensor is jittering. Thank you. Yes. Appreciate that. Yes. Wait, wait. He's been Walter has
been patiently waiting. Okay. If you go to your first slide, if you don't mind. Not the title slide, but the trends, the trends, yeah. It's the previous slide. There you go. Thank you. So I'm gonna make sure I understand the slide it says typically reported characteristics and there are a bunch of things here like for example, size, altitude speed. And if it's being observed from a single sensor, use the example of like the airplanes that were coming in. And if you don't know how far away they are, how do you assess the size? Right? How do you assess the speed? This is what people would report, but it isn't necessarily what was real size of the object or the speed or the the rest of it. Do I understand that correctly?
Partially. So yeah, this is not all single sensor observations. Some of these are very much multi sensor observations. And this is parameterised to cover the range of things for any given parameter range of what's possible and what is been observed.
Okay, and then on the next slide, the one where you've got the orb, is the meat ball moving across the
screen, that one?
So was there any look at sensor artifact data processing artifact? I mean, the first thing that whenever I say anything that's anomalous, I look at how was the data collected? Yeah.
So yes, these are these are. So this is an EO sensor on an MQ nine. And we understand that very, very well. That is that is a real object. Absolutely.
Mentioned that partnership with engineer, you also use AI ml techniques or existing datasets, or possibly some of them open source, can you explain a little bit more what kind of AI ml techniques you're using, obvious about anomaly detection, using anything related to processing or using anything related to?
So we're looking at a number of different capabilities that span I think, a lot of what you've just said, so we've got we haven't applied it yet. We are researching how we're going to apply it. So natural language processing for the reports from pilots, absolutely. Target recognition. So I can train a model to look for that thing. And go back through all of our holdings and go had give me how many of these you have, right? And then try to figure out what those are. So I have not put anything out there yet, or have not looked at anything yet, for active targeting in real time. Because I don't know exactly what I would train it to go look for. I just know what we have. So I want to get more confidence on what we have before I go and do that. Except for balloons. Alright. We're trying to get rid of balloons as quickly as possible.
So Shawn, I just wanted to begin by thanking you for your service to this nation in this committee, you don't exactly have the easiest job in Washington.
No, I do not appreciate it and recognize that?
We certainly do. I also want to commend you noting the international partnerships. Spain just signed the Artemis accords yesterday, they increasing the membership to 25. I think that's a global partnership that you could leverage. Only 170 more countries to go NASA signed up. I just have two questions, one, relative to what Nadia was asking you about the number of anomalous phenomena. What makes it anomalous in your view, what is the phenomenology where you're pulling those cases out? And saying this is truly unexplained? And then my second question would be relative to the stigma, how damaging is that, in your view? And what in particular Do you think NASA can do to help remedy the situation?
As a great question, so I'm going to take this second one first, because I know we're getting short on time. The stigma has improved significantly over the years since the Navy first took this on, some years ago. It is not gone. And in fact, I would argue the stigma exists inside the leadership of all of our, our buildings, right? wherever that is. My team and I have also been subjected to lots of harassment, especially coming out of my last hearing. Because people don't understand the scientific method and why. Why we have to do the things we have to do. Right and because we can't just come out and say, you know, the greatest the greatest thing that could happen to me is I could come out and say, Hey, I know where all these things are. Here you go. Alright, but I don't right. And it's going to take us time to research all that People want answers now. And so they are, they're actually feeding the stigma by by exhibiting that kind of behavior to all of us. Right? That is, that is a bad thing. Where can NASA help I made that recommendation on NASA should lead the scientific discourse, we need to elevate this conversation. We need to have this conversation in an in an open environment like this where we aren't going to get harassed. Because this is a hard problem. It is a hard target problem, we need to understand what is the things that are in all of our domains space or air under sea? And how do we make sense of that? Your first question on what makes it anomalous to me, we actually developed some definitions on all of these things. We gave it both to the White House and to Congress, I think we've got some of that into law now. But essentially anomalous is anything that is not readily understandable by the operator or the sensor. Right, so is doing something weird, whether that's maneuvering against the wind at Mach two with no apparent propulsion, or it's going into the water, which we have, we have shown is not a case, that is actually a sensor anomaly that we've now figured out, and we're going to be publishing all that. You know, those kinds of things, make anomalous signature. We'll call it signature management. But it's things that are not read readily understandable in the context of, hey, I've got a thing that's out in the light, it should reflect a certain amount of light. If it doesn't reflect that amount of light, something weird.
We have time for one last question.
Shawn, you're recommended for in partnership with NASA. I'm curious, especially given your map. Have you as arrow partnered with international agencies? And is there ways for reporting to your?
So that's, that's great question. I want to expound on that just a little bit. So I have just held our first five eyes forum on this subject. Last week, I think it was earlier this week. I don't know Dan, was there. And we have, you know, we've we've entered into discussions with our partners on data sharing, how do they do reporting? What kind of analysis? Can they help us with? What kind of calibration can they help us with? What can we help them with, and we're establishing all of that right now. And they're going to end up, you know, sending their information and data to us defeat into the process that we've laid out for how we're going to do all this. Beyond that, I have not had either the time or the bandwidth to do and that's why I would look to now sir, to expand the scientific and and, and academic relationships that they have across all of our allies and partners, on how can we bring them into the fold? That's where I think there's a lot of benefit to NASA taking lead on that.
Great, thank you. One. Clarification for people who don't know, what are the five eyes?
Oh, I'm sorry. For those of you that aren't familiar with the five eyes, those are the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. So those are the five partners.
Terrific. So thank you very much. Thank you.
So our next presentation is from Mike free from the FAA. Talking about the FAA is rolling what's learned.
We'd like to thank the panel for the opportunity to come and give an overview of the FAA and some data points around the FAA Eve's mission, the date of the FAA provides to provide the frame you know, what are the surveillance systems that that we can bring to bear are there there's data around those sensors as well as to frame the limitations of those and Shawn talked about some of the data points that that are used and being integrated. So, hopefully this will give you an overview the FAS mission, as well as as well as those data points. And next slide please. So the the FAA is mission is is quite large and complex by by a factor of two we operate A more commercial aircraft than any other country. I think we're second only to Australia in total airspace, but largely because Australia has a very large oceanic volume that they're responsible for for managing. So it is a very complex, very large National Airspace System. We have over 14,000 controllers 520 air traffic control towers, which are located at the highest density of airports. And I'll refer to those as towers and subsequent slides. We have 147, what we call terminal radar approach controls or tray cones, and those are manned control facilities at the high and medium density airports around the nation, as well as 21 air traffic control centers, which are which manage the control of air traffic in the enroute environment. There's 19,000 over 19,000 airports 5000 Over 5000 of those are associated public airports with the remaining 14,000 Plus private airports. Next slide please. So the FAA is mission is primarily around safe and efficient control of manned aircraft that has been her our historical mission and remains our primary mission. Certainly, as we talk about a new entrance with UAS is and advanced Air Mobility and some of those things, there will be an evolution of the FAA is mission to include safe operation of the NASS with those those new entrants, but the architecture and design of the NASS is is geared around safe and efficient control of aircraft, unmanned aircraft. The certainly the the commercial aspect to commercial flights are a primary focus of the agency, we certainly support general aviation and flights as well. But again, our mission is around manned aircraft and safe and efficient operation of those. The by the numbers, over 16 million flights, nearly 5400 flights at peak any given the peak time of any given day. 45,000 daily flights 25 million GA flight hours per year, very large, very complex operation that that we're responsible for managing, we certainly provide a significant contribution to to that for that service to the nation in the form of product toward a GDP. Next slide. So as we get into the discussion of surveillance services, I want to provide a little bit of framework around the categorization of our surveillance services. And we primarily break those into two, two bodies. The Klopper surveillance which is defined by an A sensor, that's avionics equipment on board, the aircraft that works in conjunction with ground based sensors, the noncooperative surveillance is independent this is basically the classic radar RF energy is transmitted out, reflects off the target and we receive that signal. And from that return, we can determine where that there that aircraft is. Typically these cooperative and noncooperative sensors are co located together, one cooperative mounted on top of the noncooperative radar. So from the purpose from a data perspective, I think in this panel in this study, I think that the Klapa sensors, those are neither unknown or anomalous. So for the purposes of this, this briefing of the rest of this briefing, I'm going to focus on the non cooperative aspect. Next slide, please. So, the, again, from the standpoint of the mission of the FAA around again, is primarily around manned aircraft. And I think that sort of serves as an important framework for the data points and the type of data that we can bring to bear for this panel. So we break our systems and the design of the systems into different types of systems. So we have short range radars, which are typically located at the high and medium density airports. And those operate from a range I have a detection range of between 40 and 60 miles and an altitude detection capability of about 24,000 feet. The long range radar systems have a detection range of two to 250 nautical miles with altitude detection up to 100,000 feet. So that provides the basic the framework for for those, I will mention the automatic dependent surveillance broadcast or ATSB only from a context that that does serve as a primary data source and preferred data source for the management The Airspace System, but it is a cooperative system. And for the purposes of the next slides as I get into the discussion of the coverage and the type of detection for those non cooperative targets, it is not considered as part of those. And also surface surveillance is also something that we provide. But again for the purpose of the study, I only include those for just a completeness perspective. The one final point when I talk about manned aircraft and primary mission for the drones and balloons and things of that nature, their basic premise is to operate and not to interfere bases that they are not to interfere with manned operations. And that's that's a fundamental aspect as we talk to the data and what we can and can detect with respect to those non Vande non man systems. Next slide please. Realize and this is an eye chart this I would wanted to provide just a graphical or pictorial depiction of where our sensors are located. The green, blue and pink balloons if you will, represent our short range radars, those are located at at airports. Those are where those are sited, the the two reddish balloons to have letters in on the four and a C. Those represent our long range radars, the officer fours and Carcer systems that are used in the context of both from an air traffic control perspective as well as for a national defense and homeland security mission. And the the perimeter, the RC fours are located around the perimeter of the country equally spaced in the Carcer systems are located on the interior of the US. I will point out that this only depicts the CONUS there are systems at ATC both short range and Long Range Systems, Hawaii, Alaska and Caribbean. Those are not depicted here. I don't think they were necessary for the the purpose of understanding that surveillance. And I will also point out that both for this slide and the subsequent coverage slide we do not talk to any classified DoD or DJ systems that an operation. Next slide please.
So what it is, what can the FAA detect and surveil what can get me not this slide gives you a buy altitude slice of what it is that we can detect. So if you look at the square that's labeled 1000 foot AGL that depicts by sensor for an aircraft that is 1000 feet in altitude, what is the range at which we can detect that aircraft, and so on as you get higher and altitude. Or further higher and altitude you can detect at at further range. And that's basically a phenomena of the curvature of the earth and the line of sight aspect of these these radar systems. So pretty good coverage across the US at 10,000 feet. And above. This is a mathematical model based of a pure line of sight, as well as some geographical screening. As you can see, in the western part of the US there are there is screening due to the mountains, and those sensors need to take a little bit of time and talk about the nature of the targets, these line of sight models represent an input of a target that is one square meter to think of sphere at one meter in diameter. That's the assumption that goes into these models. So if you think about that, in the context of other forms of aircraft, a fourth generation F 15, or F 18, is in the product proximity of about one square meter, perhaps a little bit larger. A large airliner is perhaps 100 square meters, a small UAS is perhaps one or a point 01 square meter. So the range of these detections are there are the size and the ability to check these targets from an F 15. Large airliner, 100 times larger in size, a drone 100 times smaller in size. So the detection of an A surveillance capability really largely depends in part to the target that we're talking about and the ability to surveil that target. Next line. So I do include this ADB ADSB coverage lie detector to give a context of from a cooperative perspective. There is very good coverage. across the US to without 1500 feet above ground level. So this provide a context of what when we look at the data and start getting a discussion of what it is we can detect this will certainly for those cooperative aircraft that have ATSB, we can certainly detect those to a pretty pretty low altitude across across the US. Alright, a couple of data points, I think. I know Shawn certainly talked about some of the data points and I can provide a little bit of insight. From an FAA perspective. drones and drones are pretty significant challenge. As 880,000 registered drones in the US. Small drones I should say, apart one of seven drones, many 10s of 1000 of those are operate operated on a daily basis for by commercial operators. It's not clear how many private drone operators are taking their their drone up for a quick flight. But as I said earlier, those are regulated by the regulated to operate below 400 feet and altitude. So again, it's the drone aspect is for those small drones in particular, and as well as all all classes of drones, there are regulatory restrictions to where they can and cannot fly basically avoiding and not interfering with manned aircraft operations. second data point we talked about balloons, the weather service, we know 190 or 92. Weather Stations are released balloons twice a day. It's 6am and 00 100, Zulu and 1200. Zulu, typically two hour duration they fly up to 100,000 feet where the the envelope bursts and then the payload descends back back to Earth. So certainly 100 At least 184 balloon flights daily in the NASS you know not to consider universities and hobbyist balloons that may be launched, but those are typically small, small in size. And finally, Shawn did talk about UAPs and FAA data, a couple of data points that we do report there is a process by which air traffic controllers can report UAP sightings or, or events. Historically, those have been in the range of about three to five reports per month that have been reported. We did see an uptick of reports in August of 22. That went up to about 810, perhaps due to start like Starlink launches. And finally the with the Chinese weather, or the Chinese balloon incidents in February, we did see a significant uptick and uptick and there's like 68 UAP reports that that started in February. And we've seen a large number, you know, subsequent to them to that. I think that's all I had any questions.
You want to take the quick it's easy, actually, you can choose the questionnaires. It's easy for you. Alright.
So two questions. Two questions about the the radar data coverage. First one is do you retain any of the data? Or is it just cycled over as there is
a retention and long term retention of data? I can't recall exactly how long retain that is certainly a requirement from a retention from, like legal perspective. Exactly. But I do know there is some periodicity in the measured and determined months
retained in terms of like the raw radar, or is some processed form of data is retained. I believe
it's a process form of data. That is what was displayed on the whether it's an Indian route II RAM system or this the star system.
And then the other question is for the radars, are they operated in any sort of a tasked mode? Or are they constant search,
the current systems in our inventory just there? They're fixed face and they just rotate at either 12 RPM or five RPM depending on whether it's an enroute or terminal surveillance. Thanks, environment. Alright. Next question is
if you mentioned the server recently, three to five reports per month,
per month, how many? That is three to five reports per month for all the controllers and all of us. So there's a process by which if they see something and they want to report that they can go to report that to that, then we call it but report Hey, I saw something I didn't know what it was. So it's three to five per month across the entire 14,000 controllers per month. So you know, 45,000 operations, any given day, 30 months, 30 days, however many days in a month You know, it's a very small percentage.
Can you describe actually about this? How do you do you encourage to report? Do you feel like the stigma on UAPs? Is impairing the reporting? Bias?
I'm not aware of of all answer it this way. The the process by which UAP is reported is part of the air traffic controller order. So basically, the aircraft controllers are allowed that says, you know, if you see something, here's a process by which the procedure by which you would report it. Other than that, I'm not aware of any any specific stigma or, or limitations, and really brought Brian in a good position to, you know, to speak to that other than there is that process, and that is the process that we use to and is what represents those numbers, like, talk to
me, if I may have had a question prior to this one, how do you decide the sites where you deploy, you saw the map and has some very good coverage on the coastal areas, there were some areas of lack of coverage.
So if we went, if you go back, go back one slide from what's presented here, the what you'll see as in the eastern half of the US, there's a lot better coverage. But that's because there's a lot more population in the east, and therefore a lot more airports. And these systems are historically cited at the airport in support of those those airport operations to the west, obviously, oops, to less and less dense and fewer systems. Now, the that's from an ASR, the short range radar perspective, the long range radars are pretty much equally spaced to provide in order to provide the maximum coverage from Homeland Defense and Security perspective, as well as with higher altitude flight, the in route crews phase of air traffic control. More,
Mike, first, thank you in the FAA, for coming to share this information with us. Second,
I can you speak to a little bit of the filtering techniques that we use. So with respect to AI, no alternative question about the raw data and process, but can you just talk a little bit about, we actually aren't trying to detect everything? You know, that's actually a very good question and a very good point with respect to what we can and cannot see. So there are, you know, the closer to the ground, you point a radar, certainly you can get lower elevations, but you also start to see the effects of trees and other ground based clutter, as we call it, that starts to interfere. So we have great ability to detect a lot of things but but from an FAA mission perspective, our desire is to find that sweet spot of seeing everything to as low and altitude as we can to maximize our mission around safe operations of manned aircraft. Now, to pull that thread just a little bit further, you know, there's also limitation with respect to biologicals or insects and dust and things of this this flavor that most aircraft fly above a certain speed. So we typically will have filtering settings on our systems to get rid of the stuff that really is leaves or insects or things of that nature, so that we provide as clean a display for the controllers. So there are specific settings that we can can adjust. And it's been learned over many years to perfect those, what we call optimization of those kinds of filters to get rid of what is not a manned aircraft, not an aircraft, and provide as clean a display for the controllers as we can. Yes. Please, thanks.
Thank you. Thanks for the presentation. Would it be kind of fun? What would you said, Warren? Would it be possible to to collect the raw data? But to say that because if if it would be possible to do some calibration after the fact that Shawn was mentioning, for example, you might be to capture the phenomenology? Is it possible?
Well, when you say raw data, I think you'd have we'd have to talk a little bit about what is meant. So you know, what, from a technical perspective, pure, what we would call Inq data is huge, huge, you know, gigabyte, very, very, very large volumes of data. That would probably be cost prohibitive, and we certainly don't do that today. The there are, again, we do record data, but it is effectively the data that is has been through some form of these processes. The nice filtering is we do that today. But it certainly with enough time and money, we could certainly collect that data and I think it would, but it would be we'd have to look at the challenge of of how we would go about modifying the systems or introducing new ways to collect that that raw data as you as you described, certainly, it's feasible. It's possible, but it's not without technical challenge. Question 180
For balloon flights daily, are those characters or they just you just know they do that and then they end up where they are.
So under the balloon, I'll call a part 101. The regulations for balloons, there's very specific requirements. So for National Weather Service before they release those, they'll contact a local air traffic facility. They're gonna say, here's what time I'm going to release it. And when they release it, they have tracking. And they provide that tracking to the air traffic control facility. Throughout the flight of that particular blimp, there are commercial balloons that are also launched. But those most for the most part, as I understand that have they actually transmit their GPS position in support of where they're flying so as to ensure they're not interfering with with air traffic and to ensure that air traffic controllers are aware of where those those uploads are operating? Yes, ma'am.
So we talked about recording the three to five permit from air traffic control, but what about from the noncooperative? Surveillance? Have there been anomalies from the sensors themselves? And if so, what is the process for that?
I say the FAA mission is not around anomalies with the non-cooperative sensors themselves. So as we build an air traffic control picture, we have both the noncooperative systems which detects the target, we have a cooperative system that also detects a target, and we will tend to merge those those targets together. And so when a controllers display, they'll know is this a non crop of only or merged or combined target. So they they know, you know, basically, an increased level of confidence that on what it is or seen is, in fact, a real aircraft. So we don't make any real distinction between a non cooperative and a cooperative, other than how they get combined and put on a controllers display. So I don't know if that answered your
flight.
So so like a GA flight that does notice flying visual flight rules, those will just be picked up by the enemy. And if they don't, if they're not equipped with with a court with a cooperative avionics, those would just be picked up by the non cooperative system, that if they happen to surveil where that aircraft is flying, and so that certainly will be put on the controllers display. And they will be able to provide awareness. In fact, there's a flight following procedure by which GA pilots can ask for, hey, I'm not, I'm not squawking. I don't have a corporate system. But please help me and just through via the radio, I'm gonna go on from here to here and in providing awareness, situational awareness, if the controller has the bandwidth to to provide that data,
when most questions, yes, so I'm not a scientist. I'm a recovering attorney. And I love process. And a few questions there. If I'm a pilot, where do I find that process for reporting UAPs? Where's that articulated or captured? Second, when you mentioned that you're reporting these incidents? Who are you reporting it to? And are those incidents pulling on the thread that Reggie started? Are they being archived anywhere?
I believe they are archived, they were reported to the domestic network event network, it's an NFA organization or function? I don't I can't speak to whether for whether they would be say part of what Shawn would would include as part of his database? I presume so. So I think that was the answer to the second question. was the first question again, I'm sorry,
where does the reporting process live? If I'm a pilot, I see a UAP. Where do I go to find
that? I don't know the answer that question. I said, I'm familiar with the reporting process from a controller perspective and the order that's that use to define how controllers do their job? I am not I don't know the answer to the question from a pilot perspective.
Expected. Great. So thank you, Mike, for your presentation. And for all the help the FAA has given us as we've been learning more about the very impressive system that the FAA maintains. Thank you. I know. You know, for me, one of the many takeaways from this is a feeling that you know, just a little bit safer every time I fly in thankful for you and your colleagues for what they do to make that possible. Thank you. And we're now going to take a quick lunch break. We'll be back at 1230 and see you all soon.
