Officials

Establishment of Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena Joint Program Office

The committee recognizes that in recent years, the Department has expanded available resources to investigate potential threats involving Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). In 2020, the Department established the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force to improve its understanding of, and gain insight into the nature and origins of UAPs. Then in 2021, the Department established the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG) as a successor organization to the UAP Task Force. While AOIMSG was designed to better synchronize efforts across the U.S. Government to detect, identify, and attribute potential UAP-related threats, especially related to Special Use Airspace, the committee is concerned with the continued lack of coordination across the interagency on UAP issues, especially between the Department and the intelligence community. The committee believes a that a Joint Program Office may be a more effective construct to facilitate interagency cooperation. Consequently, the committee directs the Secretary of Defense to a submit a report to the House Armed Services Committee not later than March 1, 2023, that describes whether a Joint Program Office would be able to more effectively:

(1) Carry out the duties of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, including those pertaining to transmedium objectives or devices and unidentified aerospace undersea phenomena; space, atmospheric, and water domains; and currently unknown technology and other domains;

(2) Develop procedures to synchronize and standardize the collection, reporting, and analysis of incidents, including adverse physiological effects, regarding unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena across the Department of Defense and the intelligence community, in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence;

(3) Develop processes and procedures to ensure that such incidents from each component of the Department and each element of the intelligence community are reported and incorporated in a centralized repository;

(4) Establish procedures to require the timely and consistent reporting of unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena;

(5) Evaluate links between unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena and adversarial foreign governments, other foreign governments, or nonstate actors;

(6) Evaluate the threat that such incidents present to the United States;

(7) Coordinate with other departments and agencies of the Federal Government, as appropriate, including the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy;

(8) Coordinate with allies and partners of the United States, as appropriate, to better assess the nature and extent of unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena;

(9) Prepare reports for Congress, in both classified and unclassified form; and

(10) Ensure that appropriate elements of the intelligence community receive all reports received by the Office regarding a temporary nonattributed object or an object that is positively identified as manmade, including by creating a procedure to ensure that the Office refers such reports to an appropriate element of the intelligence community for distribution among other relevant elements of the intelligence community, in addition to the reports in the repository described in (3).