Agencies & Units

The FBI maintains the longest-running US government UAP filing system. Its master 'flying saucers' file 62-HQ-83894 began in 1947 after the Kenneth Arnold sighting and accumulated thousands of reports through the Cold War. In 2023 the bureau reopened formal FD-302 witness interviews for UAP encounters at restricted facilities.

NASA's UAP archive consists primarily of crewed-mission voice transcripts and post-mission technical / science debriefings. The most consequential records come from Apollo 11 / 12 / 17 and Skylab — including Apollo 12's 'particles escaping the Moon' and Apollo 17's 24+-hour observation of a rotating cislunar object with a two-flash pattern.

After the 2024 NDAA mandate, the Department of War (formerly DoD) declassified its most extensive set of UAP records to date. Releases include MISREP mission reports (USCENTCOM, USINDOPACOM, USNORTHCOM, USAFRICOM), Range Fouler debriefs, and AARO Photo Reports (PR20–PR49) covering 2013–2026 across the Middle East, Mediterranean, Greece, UAE, INDOPACOM and Africa.

The State Department's UAP-related releases are diplomatic cables — embassies querying or being queried about overflights and unidentified aerial objects. Notable cables: Papua New Guinea 1985 (radar contact at Angoram), Tajikistan / Kazakhstan 1994 (Captain Ed Rhodes' 747SP encounter — 'extraterrestrial and under intelligent control'), and the 2023 Mexico Congressional UAP hearing.

USPER (US Person) is the AARO designation for civilian and law-enforcement first-hand witnesses. The most detailed such record in this archive is the SECRET//NOFORN 2025 helicopter-operation statement, in which two senior US intelligence officials and a state-partner rotary crew observed coordinated 'flare up / flare down' orange-orb formations over a 30-minute window. The 2026 Western US event slides describe four further encounters witnessed by federal LE agents.

Aggregated records that pre-date the modern AARO chain — Air Force / intelligence-community incident summaries, the 1944–45 captured German armament documents, the 1947 Project Sign / 1948 Project Grudge / Project Blue Book lineage, and the 1949 Box 186 flying-disc compendium. These are largely scanned image PDFs and form the historical baseline against which modern UAP reports are compared.