We are thinking only US centric.
A more likely question would be if the craft crashed in another country. Say Bolivia. Or Rwanda.
Then the question becomes who do they call? And what happens if they don’t call the US? Or would they try to investigate the crash themselves? What if the US detected the crash but wasn’t sure it was from off-world. But knew it was very strange. Then what?
A very complicated situation just got a lot more complicated…
DARPA.
So with all these agencies involved there’s basically ZERO chance it’s kept a secret?
DARPA is primarily an agency to fund stuff. I don’t think they would be doing the actual work.
Some of the agencies involved, like NASA, have explicit policies that would prohibit keeping it a secret. And enough of the raw data would probably have been in private (non-governmental) hands to begin with, and scientists, as a class, tend to be very unsecretive.
Some of the governmental agencies would probably still try to keep everything secret, anyway. They would fail.
I, for one, would welcome our newly crashed overlords.
If they landed in the US with no visa, it would be the Border Patrol obviously.
delete
Also human centric.
Even a society at a much higher technological level than ours might have a one in a million screw up involving a crash. But they’d quickly recover enough so that they would be in charge, not some alphabet agency of a human government.
If there were any survivors it would be prudent to keep them safe and as comfortable as possible. We do not want to risk the wrath of a search & tescue mission
DARPA would probably end up involved in figuring out and using that sweet, sweet alien technology.
If they land in the U.S., it would be the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition within the Food and Drug Administration, because, as we surely all know, the only reason that extraterrestrials would land on the Earth would be to serve man.
This is when the reputation of British food finally pays off. They will eat us last.
Only if copious amounts of wine are involved.
NTSB is unlikely to punish individual alien pilots. Instead, they would investigate alien procedures and identify any alien systematic process changes that would forestall future alien crash landings.
Ghostbusters.
The obvious answer would be the president, because when they land and say “Take me to your leader” it’s either POTUS of the UN Secretary General.
If the aliens are over 50 years old, it would be a favor to them.
To “serve man” can have two meanings, but never mind that now: if they eat Americans, they’ll get cancer. Perhaps a little less so if they eat only the truly rich, particularly if they slaughter them personally. If the poor things have to resort to eating Brits, I would recommend they start with the horses.
They surely researched us before crash-landing and know that Putin controls the most nukes.
But if they are far militarily weaker than I think, António Guterres would be a better choice than Biden.
Personally, if I was an alien, I’d think the safer choice is news media. Take me to the President of Reuters.