Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (or UAPs, formerly known as UFOs) are back in the news, with the U.S. Defense Department’s recent publication of (mostly old) case files, and the release of Steven Spielberg’s new film Disclosure Day on June 12. It’s unlikely that either will move us any closer to unraveling the mystery of UAPs. What might help, though, is a method for determining which of the thousands of sightings reported every year are truly worth investigating. Toward that end, we have proposed a rating scale meant to help citizens and scientists alike assess the reliability of UAP reports based on the type and quality of evidence. This won’t solve most cases (more than half of the sightings reviewed by the U.S. government’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) lack sufficient data for rigorous analysis). But it might help us reduce the number of “false alarms.”  We start from the premise that most UAP reports stem from misunderstandings — people seeing unfamiliar objects in the sky that, if investigated fully, would have an ordinary explanation. These objects …