Sky View Final Draft
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Public UAP Sightings and the Environment: An Analysis of Sky View Potential
Richard M. Medina University of Utah Simon Brewer University of Utah Sean M. Kirkpatrick Department of Defense
CLEARED For Open Publication Feb 17, 2023 Department of Defense OFFICE OF PREPUBLICATION AND SECURITY REVIEW
Proposed journal for submission: Annals of the American Association of Geographers
Introduction
There has been growing interest by the United States government in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). Given the new focus on this potential security threat and the operational safety risks posed by these objects, the UAP Task Force was initiated on August 4, 2020 (U.S. Department of Defense, 2020). This task force, like all task forces, had a limited scope, authority and resources to address the issue and was temporary in its duration. The Deputy Secretary of Defense gave direction to transition the UAP task force into the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG) on November 23, 2021 (U.S. Department of Defense, 2021). Congressional legislation, however, overtook that direction and today's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was established on July 20, 2022 (U.S. Department of Defense, 2022) as the single authoritative UAP Office with the DoD and tasked with leading and synchronizing a whole of government approach to the issue.
The mission of the AARO is to: "synchronize efforts across the Department of Defense, and with other U.S. federal departments and agencies, to detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in or near military installations operating areas training areas special use airspace other areas of interest; and as necessary mitigate any associated threats to safety operations national security This includes anomalous…
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Page excerpts
- Page 1 025 Public UAP Sightings and the Environment: An Analysis of Sky View Potential Richard M. Medina University of Utah Simon Brewer University of Utah Sean M. Kirkpatrick Department of Defense CLEARED…
- Page 2 025 DNI report summarizes that there is no single explanation for all of these UAP, with potential sources including clutter, commercial drones, national security threats, and other unexplained…
- Page 3 025 Much of the research on UAPs has relied on firsthand accounts, psychological explanations, or specific events, which limits the systematic analysis of large area patterns (e.g., see Zimmer, 1984;…
- Page 4 025 Maybe the most popular natural explanation for UAP sightings is ball lightning. Ball lightning incidents are characterized by "a spherical or roughly spherical light-emitting object whose size…
- Page 5 025 were given, but were still locatable, when spelling errors in the city field were corrected. For those, coordinates were added using online Microsoft services to construct a more complete…
- Page 6 025 Page determined to be Unclassified Reviewed by Chief of Staff AARO IAW FY24 NDAA, Section 1841 (a)(1)(C) Date: 02/06/2025 Figure 2 NUFORC Reported Sighting Spatial Distribution for the…
- Page 7 025 the only dataset of this size and detail that allows for geographic research. Furthermore, it is impossible to discredit over 120,000 cases. It should also be mentioned here that NUFORC accepts…
- Page 8 025 Military installations – Military installation data are sourced to U.S. Census TIGER/Line shapefiles and downloaded from data.gov (data.gov, 2022). The U.S. Census created this dataset in…
- Page 9 025 model, for all variables in the model are well under 2. VIF values are traditionally accepted if they are under 5. Results The hotspot analysis shows a strong trend, with many more standardized…
- Page 10 025 rates, the posterior estimates have been exponentiated to help in interpretation. With the exception of the intercept, all model coefficients describe the rate of change of the relative rate of…