Many of us have heard the phrase that data in context creates information and that information in context can further provide us knowledge. In my nearly six decades of UFO/UAP investigation and research, the most frustrating and time consuming issue is identifying where data is and finding out how to access it. From governement projects like Sign, Grudge and Blue Book by the US Air Force, to public organizations like APRO, NICAP, BUFORA, MUFON, NARCAP, NUFORC and the list goes on, they each maintained their own repositories of data containing sighting reports. I have seen this practice continue over time to now including many others who are all in posession of cases that would be beneficial to researchers.
Rumours of data relevant to the study can be found in many governments and military organizations around the world. The Russians had a database with over 15,000 USOs. The British Government released the MOD files. The Brazilians and Chileans are alleged to have repositiories. France had its own study and database.
There is and always has been a need for a centralized repository of case files. MUFON has by now exceeded 100,000 cases and yet it provides no access to researchers who are not MUFON members. Even the US Government is alleged to have a repository and proceeds to reference cases in excess of 650 and growing. You can be reasonably sure that NASA who is doing a study to determine which systems should be used to study UAP will have their own database.
On Wednesday, 19 April 2023, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand's Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee hearing was held. Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the Program Lead, voiced that the problem that the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has is a lack of data from the multiple sources for a single incident and some of these he characterized could be a glitch and thereby dismised as evidence. Very true, systems can yield errors and glitches which makes the case not meet stringent requirements in the court of science. This validates the commentary above and I believe that Data is the biggest challenge to the UAP that we as a collective of serious researchers needs to immediately address if we ever want to solve the phenomena or at least get some definitive answers.
What person, organization can lead the charge towards data integration and centricity, with the funding to develop the single big database, implement it and store petabytes of information and implement a security architecture that gives access to serious reserachers? My hope is that someone or some organization or academic institution will help shape the direction towards a logical solution here. I know of at least 10 people who have approached me wanting to assist with data management, but it requires a bigger conversation and that includes all of us hoping for access to that database at some future time.