I seem to remember that there was in 2023 a real-life widely reported incident involving a large unidentified flying object traversing United States airspace; as I remember, it was eventually short to pieces by the U. S. Air Force.

Once that its clear that this is a legitimate UFO (Sigh UAP) crash. It would be hard to keep out any relevant agency until the executive branch gets involved and establishes protocol (Even if a protocol already exists). After which it would likely be military, since i would be the easiest to control and have the most ready resources.

Of course you would call the police/fire department first. Imagine in the old days with no mobile or google, so do you go to find a phonebook first, then go look up all the numbers of various government departments to see which one you should call?Meanswhile fire is burning everywhere. You can't be serious! This is not a serious question.

X-COM operatives, obviously

"America near a town in the deep south" - Technically, this is somewhere near Punta Arenas and Ushuaia.

What is the background of your world? Is there a MIB style secret organization that covers up such things? Is Area 51 a top secret alien tech research facility? Or is Area 51 merely a top secret R&D facility? Have the UFO crashes been ongoing for a long enough period of time for a Standard Operating Procedure to be developed and disseminated to the local law enforcement, or are the locals making it up as they go along?

@stackoverblown Well no duh the fire department/police are called. If you read the question context more thoroughly, which wasn't a long by the way, I included the part that said after local law enforcement arrived. Smh.

@MichaelRichardson This world is basically our modern world. This world is very vanilla in the sense that there have been no other known UFO encounters nor extraterrestrial interference or anything. So there are no secret organizations dealing with these type things. In fact, this is what helps create such organization.

(a) VTC:Duplicate. I get that you're likely asking for any and all governmental response, but that makes the situation worse as who gets called when based on what information is entirely circumstantial, AKA VTC:Too Story-Based. (b) There's a lot you can research (I like this one, too) and doing your due diligence before asking on Stack Exchange is expected.

@JBH This is not a dupliate of the question mentioned. The 7 year old question asks only for local authorities. This question asks for what happens next, what government auhtorities would get involved. Before complaining that others are not doing their due diligence, the least you can do is read the posts before swinging the hammer.

@MichaelK, by looking at the closevoters it can be seen that OP agreed that the proposed duplicate answers their question. Which might rise other questions, but at least sheds light on the duplicate/not duplicate.

@L.Dutch I am reading OP's comment, and they essentially said the exact thing I just said: this about what happens after the local authorities have been involved. I am — over the past few years — getting increasingly frustrated that veterans of this forum — and moderators in particular — seem very(!) eager to smack down questions, so much so that they are not only often appling the least favourable interpretation of the rules, but also reading sloppily and grabbing the first perceived opportunity they get, as seems to have happened here.

@MichaelK, before you rant on moderators: the post has been closed with the vote of community(bot), which for duplicates means OP received a notification that there was another question answering theirs and they agreed with the suggestion.

@L.Dutch And then there is a comment from OP saying the opposite. So I would be very wary before trying to state what is the mindset of OP. But this is more or less irrelevant because there are also VTC votes from veterans/mods, and dismissive comments from the same that clearly show they put a low effort to read the post, to compare the post they claimed was a duplicate, or think on the question, instead essentially handwaving it away. And my greivance is that this is not an isolated instance, this is — in my optics — a longstanding trend.

@MichaelK I mentioned the local authorities issue in my follow-up comment and mentioned that asking about national or global authorities makes the situation worse. Without providing specific procedural examples (in the form of documents or historical evidence) how any national or global organization would react is pure speculation. This quesiton is asking for help writing a story, not building any world, and that's specifically prohibited in the help center.

@JBH "how any national or global organization would react is pure speculation" Answers seem to disagree, and OP seems to be happy with them. And no, OP is not asking to write a story, but to solve a problem with their worldbuilding, the problem being not knowing how reality works, which needs solving in order to branch out an alternate reality from it. The answers are useful to more users as the other users get an insight into how information about an unusual event propagate through the administrative structure of the United States, and then acted upon.

To clarify my mindset, I asked the question because @MichaelK was correct, I don't know how these things work in reality. However the question was marked as a duplicate. I partially agreed with the sentiment as the older question answered to satisfaction and I could extrapolate the rest of what I didn't know. That being said, I was asking what would happen after the local government became aware that the UFO had crashed. Primarily, I was looking suggestions on what a potential federal response to a UFO crash would look like.

I'd also like to add I did do my proper research on the site. Partially because I did not know what to search. So, naturally, my initial queries did not bring up the 7 year old question mentioned by @JBH. I didn't appreciate the snarky remark about me not doing my research but I felt that was a pointless opinion as my question was ultimately satisfied and I didn't care about whining.

There is no single course of action that any or all U.S. government agencies will follow in the event of any circumstance you wish to describe. That's the problem. Although it's out of scope, we could objectively describe what each individual organization's "default" action to any situation would be, but the moment you ask about a chain of events, this question is off-topic. Please stop asking us to write your story for you.

Not sure where this whole "stop asking us to write the story for you" part keeps coming from. Nothing in my question asks for you to do that. Honestly the most youve contributed to this conversation forwarding that material earlier. A simple, "hey, there isn't a protocol, check this out, it may help" would've helped more than falsely accusing me of being lazy. You just being rude and grasping from straws at this point just to sound smart and condescending.

@JBH OP has not asked us to write their story. That is — indeed — a rude accusation. OP had a problem, several answers helped solve that problem, and OP happily accepted an answer. I have to echo OPs sentiment: what did you do to help? I am not seeing anything of the sort, only bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake, with a poor tone of voice to boot.

@JBH Again, I am seeing a disturbing trend on WB SE, where rules are being used as soon as there is the least reason to apply them, rather than finding the least reason to let the post pass. That does not help the quality of WB SE. We do not measure quality in the number of times rules are being used to close posts.

And conversely, when seeing posts like this — which is obviously not any kind of world(!)building(!!) — not get a single word of objection, it makes me even more despondent. Not because I do not want that questioner to get help, but because of the inconsistency. Or perhaps, the extremely rigid and blind consistency, looking only at the letter of the law and not the spirit of it.

@MichaelK The post you are referring to was closed for being off-topic before I made a call to reopen. Check its revisions if you're not sure :).

The crux of JBH's argumentation is that when such chaotic event happens, it's very hard to predict who gets there first, and therefore who gets natural social dominance and control on the situation.

@Tortliena I stand corrected on that detail. But the sentiment remains: this seems very inconsistent to me.

It's especially true when the affair becomes public (unless exceptional circumstances a leak is bound to happen) : Politicians and journalists meddle with the affairs, and the choice of action when the UFO is confirmed will depend on the president or whoever is at the head of the organization.

@Tortliena As the answer show: no. We are talking about areas of responsibility for administrative authorities. Sure, depending on what the author decides, the story can do a buttery effect. But what the default response is supposed to be, that is easily predictable, if you know how it is supposed to work.

In short, it's extremely hard to predict. As far as I know, there is no agency specialized in the USA to detect and identify unknown flying objects (unlike in France, where you have the GEIPAN).

I'd like to finish, please

This chaotic-ness is further enticed by the top-voted answer. Anything beyond the base 911 calls will come upon whoever is in charge of the state : "My prediction is that multiple agencies explain to the President that they should be the lead investigators, and the President may well decide on gut feeling. Perhaps the President trusts the uniformed services more than the spies, or perhaps the President wants to keep this under civilian agencies like NASA."

Problem is : The querent asked for what happens after they noticed the rock is more than a meteor. Ie. After the 911 call.

Exactly where the presidents of each agency will battle to have that glimmer of sunlight, especially when it becomes more and more evident it's an alien spaceship.

That was JBH point.

They — in effect — asked for what happens between the 911 call and that the President gets word. And they got a clear, consistent answer from several users: the NTSB will be called in.

They did not ask "What agencies will the president call in". They asked for responders to the event, not for those that will handle the aftermath of discovering that it is an alien craft.

And the answers were very consistent: local law enforcement and rescue services first, then the NTSB, then it reaches the President... and then you are on your own authoring what happens next.

...with some facts about what agencies could become involved, but without saying exactly how that would happen.

From the question : "After it's revealed by the local police that the crashed object is not a normal space rock". You only get the NTSB left as actual asnwer then, but would they get called if local polices know it's not an aircraft, since it is not a "normal" space rock? Don't get me wrong, but it'll get a weird person to mistake a flying spaceship with a plane, even after a crash. Or you have very human looking alien spaceship. Which is not stated.

From my opinion now, the accepted answer didn't actually answer the question. And the question is lacking quite a good chunk of details about what kind of spaceship it looks like after the crash to know the answer.

And those details are quite circumstances based (what JBH would be pointing at as Story-based) : Did it got entirely smashed up and unrecognizable? Are there alien survivors in the ship, outside or just mangled corpses? Did the guys on site decide to take a closer look at the ship and noticed the burnt 4 legged humanoids? And so on and so on.

OP seems happy with both accepted answer and my answer, and their problem was solved.

It's not being happy with an answer, it's to make a reliable answer they can use to improve their world.

They are happy because they can use it to improve their world, is that not right @NathanielRobinson?

And the querent, who isn't really an expert on the topic (otherwise why would they ask?) is not really at the best place to know which answer is really... "correct".

Not sure why you talk about prestige @MichaelK? What do you mean by being "that kind of person"?

Let me just try to be clear here since your reaction was a bit... Expeditive ^^.

First, I am not saying Nathaniel is dumb and incompetent. He just doesn't have every knowledge in the world. Like everyone, actually.

Being omniscient would be actually quite boring, actually.

Then, I never said that the question is "unworthy", even if it seems like so. That's the exact contrary to my viewpoint of the world. However, some questions should lead to counter-questions first before a final answer is made, and this kind of questions is unfortunately not well-handled here due to how the site is designed.

@Tortliena I know the question was not extremely specific. I kept it like that ironically thinking it would've made my point simple and what I was asking more straight forward.My mistake was not being specific enough so people wouldn't think I was dumb, or lazy, stupid or whatever the heck people are assuming at this point. I got the answer I was looking for, beyond that, whatever happens it up to y'all mods. I am satisfied with the answers I got.

Honestly I'm sorta fed up with this site. Seems a controlling group of people are more interested in rules and whatnot more than helping.

@MichaelK I appreciate your help. Your answer was really good and was a close second to the one I accepted. Many thanks to you and a few others who helped me solve my problem.

@NathanielRobinson You are not alone in that feeling. Anyway, glad to have helped, and I do hope you choose to stick around on WB SE since there are quite a lot of helpful people here, people that far outnumber the others.

@MichaelK The OP is asking us to explain a series of choices made by individuals and/or organizations - that's strictly prohibited in the Help Center because it's writing the story, not establishing rules for the world. I explained this in my answer to your meta question, which you dismissed because you thought my answer wasn't relevant.

@MichaelK You don't appear to understand Stack Exchange. This isn't a disturbing trend - it's the way Stack Exchange is expected to work as described in the Help Center. Questions are expected to be closed quickly to give them a chance to be repaired. It would really help if you actually took the time to read through the entire Help Center rather than making assumptions.

@NathanielRobinson Yes, Nathaniel, we are "more interested in rules and whatnot more than helping." We don't own this service. We've been invited to use it according to the rules established by the owners. The Stack itself was created through the efforts of a large group of people who had a specific idea of what kind of questions would and should be asked. They set policies for the Stack that the community accepted long ago. We discuss those policies in Meta. All users are expected to abide by the ...

... rules and embrace the policies. If that's not your cup of tea, there are many online forums that have less structure and fewer rules. You're welcome to use them.

Watch out JBH ^^; Each reply (with the reply/quote button) in chatrooms send a notification ^^". Poor MichaelK must have been spammed with notifications x).

In any case, you're right. And as much as it looks like bureaucracy for bureaucracy, you can find a good amount of actual good, non-SE reasons to do one thing or another.

@NathanielRobinson I really have to come back to this because most people don't understand : Please don't confuse remarks about what your post is with what you are. A question which needs some improvements or which is criticized doesn't mean at all that you are dumb, stupid, lazy or whatever gross word you have in mind. The only thing I can say about you directly from this question is that you are curious (curious people ask) and you have some interest in alien stories. Nothing more, nothing less.

And I mean it. If you start merging your work with yourself, whenever you will get bad reviews for it (and it will always happen, even with excellent works), you'll end yourself getting a lot more hurt than you normally would.

@JBH that's not a good thing. Rules are fine but when rules become more important that helping or directing, you become useless as a forum. And more people leave with bitter tastes rather than learning anything. That's the issue I personally have. But I get your point. I really do.

@Tortliena I appreciate that. And I am listening. But in @JBH's case, I'm accused of trying to get others to write my work for me. Especially when that was never implied or explicitly asked. That's just conjecture at best. And yes that's insulting. I personally have no issue with being told to write a better question especially if done so nicely. Yes I care about that. Others too evidently. Anyway, I had already considered a rewrite of the question over the course of this conversation.

@JBH Happy Holidays to you too, however you decide to spend them. And — in case it it was missed — I am out of the discussion, simply CBA about any toxic prestige fight.

At this point I'm out too. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all

@Tortliena As I mentioned earlier, I have a major revision in mind for this question. Should I a) edit the post to reflect the revision, b) repost this question as a second question given there is significantly more added to it, or c) post the revised question in meta to see if it's viable or not?