OVERVIEW

Confronting Unknowns is a two-day IAP program for those who are interested in making sense of anomalies, with a focus on unidentified phenomena, autonomous systems, aerospace safety, and national security. The course focuses on ambiguous events in civil and military airspace: robot swarms, hypersonic fly-bys, sensor confusion, spoofed tracks, and reports that don’t fit current checklists.

Using real incidents, open-source intelligence, and engineering tools, we ask a practical question: when something strange shows up in the data, who sees it, who believes it, and what happens next? Participants trace cases from cockpit and control room through safety systems, policy channels, and the public record. The aim is to practice sense-making under pressure and build working language for “unknowns” that are easy to ignore or mislabel.

STRUCTURE

The program runs over two afternoons on campus, followed by a voluntary Writer’s Workshop after the course. 

Day 1 is organized under the working title of 'Signals and Systems / Where Things Break' and Day 2 as 'Shaping the Response / How We Build Better'. 

Content is organized via Briefs, Sensemaker Spotlights, and Hands-On Engagements. 

• Anchor Sessions: There will be a series of topical Briefs that provide situational awareness based on fundamental questions each speaker is to address. e.g, Opening Brief to outline the seriousness and rigor needed for our mission. Some might be pre-recorded/ interview format. 

• Sensemaker Spotlights are personal talks where aviators, engineers, analysts, or operators share focused case examples and actionable insights from their own experience.

• Hands-On Engagements: Integrated into the course is a live wargame / simulation that puts the whole cohort inside a fast-moving aerospace incident, forcing teams to make calls with incomplete and conflicting information.

Students, operators, and invited guests from engineering, security, and policy communities work through topics / scenarios together. It is our goal for there to be little sense of a division or ‘wall’ between speakers and everyone else in the room – all are members of the cohort and most are expected to participate fully in the program. All participants exercise repeated reps in developing their sensemaking skills, built up with tools such as STPA/CAST-style safety analysis, basic OSINT validation drills, and anomalous case analysis. 

KEY OUTCOMES

By the end of CU26, participants will:

• Climb the (figurative) ladder of unknowns: Ignoring, Recognizing, Confronting, and Embracing

• Identify patterns in aerospace incidents that signal an “unknown” rather than a routine equipment or human-error label.

• Generalize sensemaking as a leadership skill applicable to most fields (and beyond aerospace-adjacent domains).

• Assess risk and decision analysis in the critical evaluation of information.

• Formulate a conceptual playbook to classify and triage anomalous events for further investigation instead of losing them in catch-all categories.

• Practice applying STPA/CAST thinking, OSINT checks, and autonomy / swarm simulations to messy, partial datasets.

• Improve their ability to talk across engineering, operations, and policy lines about anomalous phenomena without hype.

• Engage in a team-based learn-by-doing wargaming simulation.

• Leave with a network of peers and mentors who care about weird signals in aerospace and are willing to engage in follow-up discourse and research

• Have an opportunity to co-author a publication about their learnings toward anomalous  phenomena.