The Study of Unidentified Aerial/Aerospace Phenomena Towards Disruptive Propulsion Concepts

Dear Colleagues,

Unidentified Aerial/Aerospace Phenomena (UAP) have become a topic of growing interest for aerospace scientists, physicists, engineers, defense and the general public at large. This is testified by international research efforts of organizations such as the AIAA UAP Integration and Outreach Committee, Project Hessdalen, SOL Foundation, Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, Society for UAP Studies and academic projects at Harvard (Galileo Project), Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Würzburg (IFEX), Lund University and University of Albany (UAlbany Project X), involving scholars/researchers from different disciplines, particularly engineers and physicists. Such multi-disciplinary research efforts have recently culminated into a number of high-impact scientific publications, de facto establishing the new science of UAPs and opening up new timely opportunities for advancing academic research on this potentially disruptive subject, particularly for aerial/aerospace technologies.

While recent scientific literature has mostly focused on a comprehensive review and detailed analysis for a small representative selection of historical UAP cases for which enough multi-instrumental data were available to be studied, the proposed Special Issue aims to move the discussion further by addressing two main research questions:

• What latest developments in multi-modal/multi-instrumental data collection and analysis allow for better tracking UAPs and characterizing their performance?
• What disruptive physics-based propulsion concepts may (attempt to) explain the reported performance and observables (e.g., hypersonic velocity, absence of sonic boom or heat signature, instantaneous accelerations, trans-medium capability)?

While systematically collecting and analysing data, including with the help of AI-driven algorithms/systems, is essential to better characterise UAPs, the end goal remains to translate the observables into insights/inspiration to build new disruptive technologies providing enhanced performance for aerial/aerospace systems. This Special Issue aims to bridge both of these aspects, combining empirical/technical contributions about detection/tracking and reproducible data analysis of UAPs to better characterize their performance with first-principle theories/models possibly able to reproduce such an observed performance, leading to innovative propulsion systems (e.g., plasma-driven, field-based) that are under current investigation. Such innovative propulsion mechanisms must result from physics-based, hypothesis-driven research with testable prediction/validation pathways, ideally proposing suitable experimental techniques/setups, mathematical/computational models or advanced materials (e.g., high-temperature superconductors, metamaterials) with verifiable properties to enable their development.

Dr. Andrea Lani
Dr. Anders Warell
Gary V. Stephenson
Guest Editors

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• unidentified aerial phenomena
• unidentified aerospace phenomena
• hypersonics
• multi-sensor systems
• hyper-spectral cameras
• AI-driven data analysis
• tracking systems
• trans-medium
• electrodynamics
• magnetohydrodynamics
• field propulsion
• quantum gravity