How do I know if a mission is a UFO precursor?

[idleray]

In Xwynn's recent video "Lord of the Dance", after he finishes a mission he looks at a hack mission and somehow concludes that it is a UFO precursor mission, and later it turns out he was correct. my question is how exactly do you reason out that a given mission is UFO precursor?(leads to UFO after you complete it).

[Psieye]

It looks like Lib1. Especially when you've already done Lib1 in that region.

[idleray]

questions:

1. How do you know if a mission is Lib1? It seems to me that every hack mission has "Find a Lead" as an objective

2. How do I keep track of whether I've already done Lib1 in a region? The objective boxes on the top left- do they apply to the current region Avenger is in? If not how can I tell for which region the boxes are ticked for?

[Skyfire]

1. How do you know if a mission is Lib1? It seems to me that every hack mission has "Find a Lead" as an objective

Lib1 (and UFOs) have 'find a lead' as an objective but don't list any rewards other than intel. (In particular, any mission with a POI as a reward is not Lib1).

2. How do I keep track of whether I've already done Lib1 in a region? The objective boxes on the top left- do they apply to the current region Avenger is in? If not how can I tell for which region the boxes are ticked for?

If you open up the Resistance Management screen that lists all of your current Havens, there will be small dots next to the name of any region you have started the Lib chain for - one dot means you've done Lib1 in that region, two dots means you've done Lib2 (I think it only marks those two, since past Lib3 the Tower/HQ/liberated region are pretty obvious anyway).

The objective boxes aren't really 'for' any region in particular; they just track whether you've successfully reached that stage anywhere.