Framing the Unknown: Security Narratives and Ethics of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Disclosure

Abstract

The 2025 Sky Canada Project is the first national government-administered dataset on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). Using the UAP context and these data, I examine how citizens’ security framing sensitivity (SFS) predicts support for governmental policy interventions including disclosure. I define security framing sensitivity (SFS) as the extent to which individuals interpret UAP through flight safety and national security lenses. I use the 2025 Sky Canada Project (n = 1,008) to construct within-person relative expectations for alternative policy measures. I find that citizens with a higher SFS are more supportive of all policy demands investigated. When relative policy expectations are examined, the findings suggest that citizens do not uniformly request disclosure as the most significant policy intervention. In particular, I find that a higher SFS is associated with a greater demand for government “seriousness” regarding UAP. Seriousness is interpreted as the expectation that government treat UAP as just another legitimate and important policy issue. This pattern may indicate that security-sensitive respondents differentiate between transparency and responsible governance. The implications are discussed.