UAP (what are they?), NHI (who are they?), and us (who are we?)

UFOs, now more commonly known as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), have been a fixture of popular culture ever since 1947. Yet the phenomenon has long been denigrated by governmental authorities and the scientific community alike, dismissed as the prerogative of cranks and conspiracy theorists. The picture began changing, though, in 2017 when the New York Times revealed that the U.S. government, contrary to their apparent public indifference, had actually set up various secretive projects to monitor this issue. For its part though, science is still playing catch-up, belatedly realizing this is a topic which demands genuine and indeed urgent attention. To that end, this review paper summarizes the latest thinking on this phenomenon for academics unfamiliar with the topic, drawing on scientific and philosophical literature, as well as pertinent information from governmental and journalistic sources. The material is organized into three sections, as indicated in the title of the paper, covering, (a) UAP themselves, (b) the potential entities that may be responsible for them, referred to generically as Non-Human Intelligence (NHI), and (c) the implications of this topic for us humans, including potentially—if NHI have interacted with us throughout our history—rethinking our own development and place in the cosmos.