Test detail

The following systematically discusses these issues.

What the 'Aviation Safety' and 'National Security' Framework Excludes from UAP Research

Introduction: Framing as Power

The choice of "which framework to address a problem within" is not a neutral act. It is a power act that predetermines what questions may be asked, who holds authority to answer, and what data counts as legitimate. When UAP becomes confined within the dual framework of "aviation safety" and "national security," analyzing what is placed outside becomes an extremely important question from the perspectives of science studies, philosophy of science, and epistemology.

I. Current State of Institutional Framework

The AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) was established with the mission to "synchronize identification, attribution, and mitigation of UAP near national security areas."

Fundamentally, the UAP issue is positioned as a national security concern, with the NDAA stipulating that "unidentified objects in any domain pose potential threats to national security and safety," mandating UAP responses only within this context.

AARO constructs case management architecture integrating information from military sensors, civilian aviation, and FAA systems, but this framework addresses anomalous reports as "aviation safety concerns" rather than as subjects of scientific curiosity.

In other words, the current institutional design is consistently constructed toward applied, defensive goals of "threat identification and mitigation," while the goal of fundamental understanding of phenomena is not built in.

II. What This Framework Excludes: Six Dimensions

1. Possibilities of Open Scientific Inquiry

Despite decades of investigative effort by the U.S. government regarding UAP, it has never publicly presented a definitive resolution.

This persistent "state of non-resolution" is an inevitable consequence of the security framework prioritizing risk management over phenomenon elucidation.

To date, major universities have not established UAP research centers, federal science agencies do not provide competitive research grants for UAP studies, and no doctoral programs exist to train researchers.

This directly reflects that the government's framework has not granted academic institutions "social permission." What is missing is not interest or data, but a "shared scaffold" that converts isolated curiosity into cumulative science.

2. Intellectual Autonomy and Careers of Scholars and Researchers

A 2023 national survey across 144 major U.S. research universities spanning 14 disciplines (1,460 respondents) found that the majority considered UAP research important, with intellectual curiosity exceeding skepticism across all fields. Nearly one in five had personally witnessed unidentified aerial phenomena. Yet fewer than 1% had actually conducted UAP-related research.

This gap was not due to intellectual dismissal but to fear. Researchers were deterred not primarily by intellectual skepticism but by fears of losing funding, ridicule from colleagues, and quiet career destruction.

More critically, a 2024 follow-up study found that approximately 28% of respondents would likely vote against tenure for colleagues who conducted UAP research, despite personally recognizing the research's value.

Part of the origin of this stigma lies with government itself. Much academic stigma derives from the Air Force-funded Condon Report, which cautioned against supporting scientific papers on "flying saucers" and reportedly "recommended that teachers not award credit to students for reading UFO literature."

3. Existential Questions Regarding Phenomenon Essence

The security framework necessarily classifies UAP into three categories: ① advanced weaponry of hostile nations, ② self-made sensor malfunction, ③ flight hazard materials. This classification system completely seals off questions about the physical, natural, and cognitive essence of the phenomenon regardless of which option is selected.

Crucially, "unidentified" represents a procedural status, not an ontological conclusion. It indicates the limits of classification, not final truth about origin.

Indeed, some researchers note that "while standard scientific tools are being applied to UAP research, this phenomenon appears to exceed classical science's purview."

Within the security context, the very act of asking questions becomes institutionally difficult across frameworks of physics, atmospheric science, cognitive science, psychology, or neuroscience.

4. Democratization of Witness Testimony and Data

The stigma accompanying UAP is real, powerful, and represents a challenge to national security. It silences commercial pilots fearing professional impact and intimidates witnesses.

The security framework tends to prioritize "military sensor data" as legitimate evidence while marginalizing observations by civilians, scientists, and ordinary citizens.

AARO's director acknowledges that datasets are heavily skewed toward military sensors and exercise ranges, and attempts to address this by expanding reporting mechanisms from FAA and civilian pilots.

However, even this "expansion" remains within the context of "aviation safety concerns," denying scientific specimen status.

5. Interdisciplinary and Humanities Approaches

The UAP phenomenon involves not only physics but also epistemological, cognitive scientific, religious, sociological, and cultural-anthropological questions.

Sessions addressing humanities and social science dimensions discuss how culture, folklore, and media shape UAP reports and interpretations, while phenomenological positions argue that "human experience itself constitutes valid scientific data."

The security framework structurally excludes these "non-engineering, non-informational" questions because it recognizes only threat/non-threat binaries.

6. Recognition as "Paradigmatic Anomaly"

From a philosophy-of-science perspective, the most serious issue is the inability to place "anomaly" in Kuhn's sense into scientific dialogue.

Science historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific communities suppress anomalous questions not because they cannot be answered, but because the community collectively decided they fall outside boundaries deemed "worth investigating."

Similarly, sociologist Thomas Gieryn termed this suppression "boundary work"—the active policing by scientists of what constitutes legitimate science.

The security framework executes this "boundary work" at the institutional level. By framing UAP as a "national security issue," it pre-emptively strips away institutional legitimacy for treating it as a "scientific problem."

As Harvard research groups have noted, science should "not doctrinally reject potential explanations based on social stigma or cultural preference. Such elements are incompatible with the scientific method of unbiased empirical inquiry."

III. Structural Paradox: Security Framework Even Impedes Data Collection

AARO's 2025 Consolidated Annual Report states it has received reports suggesting phenomena exhibiting performance characteristics beyond known technological levels, yet contains no technical data.

This is a serious paradox. The security framework renders vast data highly classified, with DoD and intelligence community bureaucracies consistently refusing accountability in ways that prevent scientific understanding of UAP. That is, a framework intended for "threat identification" paradoxically prevents public release of the very data necessary for identification itself.

IV. Modest Resistance Attempts and Their Limitations

Professor Avi Loeb at Harvard University founded the Galileo Project in 2021, aiming to "identify the nature of UAP through transparent analysis based on standard scientific methods."

The Society for UAP Studies operates as a nonprofit organization, convening international symposia of physicists, philosophers of science, and social scientists, and managing the double-blind peer-reviewed journal "Limina."

Yet these remain exceptions. Throughout 2024, NASA conducted no official public actions, statements, press conferences, or press releases regarding UAP, with substantive results nearly nonexistent.

Conclusion: The Violence of Framing

What the "aviation safety" and "national security" framework excludes is not merely a research topic. It excludes:

Ultimately, what this framework most deeply excludes is the foundational scientific spirit itself: humbly acknowledging what we do not know and continuing to ask about it in public spheres. Security logic is intolerant of "non-resolution," and therefore cannot tolerate "still not knowing."

When UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) are addressed only within "aviation safety" and "national security" frameworks without treating them as subjects of scientific inquiry, the following important aspects and perspectives may be excluded:

1. Loss of Opportunities to Expand Scientific Knowledge:

• Limitations of Scientific Methods: By excluding scientific inquiry, opportunities to understand new physical phenomena or unknown technology become limited. The potential scientific insights and technological impacts of UAP may be overlooked.

2. Absence of Diverse Perspectives:

• Promotion of Fixed Viewpoints: While scientific inquiry encourages approaches from diverse academic disciplines, limiting analysis to aviation safety and national security frameworks may promote biased perspectives, resulting in insufficient multifaceted analysis.

3. Promotion of Bias:

• Excessive Threat Vigilance: When an exclusive security-focused approach is emphasized, phenomena that may not represent threats could become over-scrutinized, potentially promoting misunderstanding and conspiracy theories.

4. Restriction of Public Understanding and Engagement:

• Limited Information and Discussion: While scientific inquiry promotes wider public dissemination and discussion, deepening public understanding and engagement, security-centered frameworks restrict information, potentially creating biased societal awareness.

5. Delayed Exploration and Innovation:

• Delayed Basic Science Research: If fundamental scientific research does not proceed, opportunities for future technological innovation and novel discovery may be lost.

Treating UAP as subjects of scientific inquiry alongside security considerations would enable more comprehensive understanding of UAP's diverse possibilities, potentially fostering innovation and advancement. This approach could create opportunities for discovery of new technologies and knowledge, promoting further development.

UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), when handled by governments only within the frameworks of "aviation safety" and "national security," excludes important scientific inquiry and considers aspects that merit exploration, including:

1. Lack of Understanding of Fundamental Nature:

• Limitations of Scientific Method: The aviation safety and national security frameworks focus primarily on determining whether phenomena pose existing threats or aviation risks. This causes fundamental scientific questions—"What is UAP?", "How does it function?", "What is its origin?"—to be deprioritized or entirely unexplored. Science aims to deepen understanding of phenomena through hypothesis construction, data collection, analysis, verification, and peer review, but this framework makes such processes difficult to apply.
• Exclusion of Unexplained Physical Phenomena: Whether UAP represents currently unexplainable physical phenomena or relates to extraterrestrial life or unknown civilizations is not directly relevant to national security or aviation safety perspectives. Since these frameworks focus on known threats (foreign aircraft, drones, weather phenomena) and known aviation risks, motivation to understand genuinely unknown things weakens.

2. Loss of Opportunities to Utilize Broad Expertise:

• Limited Professional Fields: Aviation safety and national security frameworks center on pilots, air traffic controllers, military analysts, intelligence professionals, and defense technologists. However, genuine UAP elucidation might require expertise from physicists, astronomers, meteorologists, materials scientists, psychologists, and even sociologists and historians. Excluding these diverse perspectives and analytical methods impedes multifaceted phenomenon understanding.

3. Absence of Data Transparency and Public Disclosure:

• Priority of Secrecy: Within the national security framework, information classification takes precedence, making UAP-related data (observation records, radar data, video footage) unlikely to be publicly released. Scientific inquiry advances through data sharing, open discussion, and collaborative research; classification severely hampers this. As a result, independent researchers and academic institutions lose opportunities to analyze phenomena and generate new insights.
• Accountability and Credibility Issues: Lack of transparency may breed public distrust of government responses. Information concealment facilitates speculation and conspiracy theories, making healthy public discourse difficult.

4. Neglect of Long-Term Perspectives and Broad Impacts:

• Short-Term Threat Assessment Bias: National security and aviation safety often focus on immediate threats and risks. However, UAP's potential long-term scientific, technological, cultural, or philosophical impacts receive almost no consideration under these frameworks. If UAP fundamentally changes humanity's science, technology, or worldview, limiting its exploration to short-term threat assessment would constitute tremendous loss for humanity.

Thus, handling UAP only through "aviation safety" and "national security" frameworks excludes not merely a research theme, but rather:

• The ability to understand the whole picture of the phenomenon
• Scientific and intellectual efforts toward comprehending its true nature
• Broad perspectives and possibilities humanity should possess

In this way, the frameworks significantly limit scientific and intellectual endeavor regarding UAP.

Primary Elements This Framework Excludes

When governments (particularly the U.S. Department of Defense's AARO and similar agencies) limit UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) treatment to "aviation safety" and "national security" contexts, they make a structural choice to view the phenomenon through a single lens only. This framing itself excludes the following:

1. Pure Scientific Inquiry and Open Science

• Independent Academic Research and Peer Review: Under military and intelligence-agency-led investigations, data becomes easily classified, making reproduction experiments and long-term observation by external physicists, atmospheric scientists, and astronomers difficult. The scientific method's core elements—freedom of hypothesis presentation, falsifiability, and open discussion—become institutionally restricted.
• Exclusion of Interdisciplinary Approaches: If UAP represents atmospheric optical phenomena, plasma, unknown natural phenomena, or non-human-origin phenomena, exploration frameworks spanning physics, meteorology, and biology (e.g., biological signals and environmental impacts) become blocked. Under a security lens, only "threat or non-threat" gets questioned.
• Absence of Long-Term, Basic Research: Immediate threat assessment favors short-term data collection, while decades-long statistical and theoretical analysis (e.g., global UAP distribution correlations with astrophysics) receives lower priority.

2. Citizen Participation and Non-Military Sectors' Involvement

• Data Sharing with General Public and Scientific Community: Military secrecy walls prevent NASA and universities from full access, obstructing public scientific literacy advancement and citizen science projects (e.g., large-scale open analysis of witness databases).
• Space for Diverse Interpretation: Security perspectives bias toward fitting "hostile drones, foreign technology, sensor misidentification" into known categories, marginalizing interpretations of "unknown natural phenomena" or "phenomena suggesting entirely new physics."

3. Socio-Cultural and Philosophical Dimensions

• Stigma and Suppressed Testimony: Military and security contexts risk treating witnesses (especially civilian pilots and ordinary people) as "conspiracy theorists," causing valuable primary data loss. Scientific inquiry could enable psychological and sociological analysis of testimony.
• Existential and Ethical Questions: Scientific frameworks like SETI could address non-human intelligence (NHI) possibilities, but security lenses prevent such discussion, excluding perspectives on "humanity's cosmic perspective transformation" and "international peaceful collaborative inquiry."
• Global Academic Cooperation: National security frames risk treating international data-sharing as espionage, impeding formation of international scientific consortia.

4. Resulting Structural Bias

This framework defines UAP as "problems extending existing security systems," thereby pre-emptively excluding possibilities for paradigm-shifting innovation. Aviation safety processes known aircraft/weather phenomena extensions; national security handles "hostile actor technology." Neither accommodates "unknown something" with properties (e.g., physics characteristics implying advanced propulsion) exceeding existing classification bounds, institutionally narrowing space for scientific verification.

Essentially, this framework structurally renders organizational and cultural "inquiry beyond threat management" impossible. If UAP proves merely misidentification or known technology, no problem exists. But if otherwise, this approach may mean humanity actively closes its own path to understanding phenomena's true nature.