UAP Records — Timeline

Decade-level overview of official UAP documentation periods, with linked records grouped by decade.

87 official records indexed across decades.

1940s–1960s

Early Documentation Era

The U.S. Air Force ran three successive investigations of unidentified aerial objects in this period: Project SIGN (1948), Project GRUDGE (1949), and Project BLUE BOOK (1952–1969). Their case files, administrative records, photographs, and films are held in the National Archives as Record Group 341 — this archive indexes the catalog entries for the case files, administrative files, and the SIGN and GRUDGE technical reports. Blue Book Special Report No. 14 (1955), a statistical analysis of the sightings collected to that point, is here in full text. Project Blue Book operated until December 1969, closing after the 1968 Condon Report and a National Academy of Sciences assessment; it concluded that no investigated sighting had indicated a threat to national security, represented technology beyond present scientific knowledge, or shown an extraterrestrial origin. These records are the historical foundation for the U.S. government's later UAP work.

18 records

1970s–1990s

FOIA and Declassification Period

After Project Blue Book closed, no dedicated U.S. government UFO investigation operated publicly for decades. The records of this period document release rather than investigation: Freedom of Information Act requests and systematic declassification moved earlier UFO files into public access, and the National Archives makes UAP-related textual and microfilm records available for public research. One notable piece of contemporaneous documentation is the Federal Aviation Administration's records on Japan Airlines Flight 1628 — a 1986 sighting reported by a cargo crew over Alaska — preserved in the National Archives and indexed here.

6 records

2000s

Pre-Modern UAP Records

This archive currently indexes no official landing pages dated to the 2000s — a gap in documentation, not in events. The decade's most consequential U.S. military UAP encounter — the November 2004 USS Nimitz incident recorded in the FLIR1 video — entered the official public record only retroactively, through the Department of Defense's 2020 video release, the 2021 ODNI assessment's 2004–2021 reporting window, and AARO's later case work. Records of this era, where they exist, live inside those later releases rather than as contemporaneous publications.

Not yet indexed

2010s

Congressional Engagement Period

UAP re-entered the official record through defense and intelligence channels in this decade. Three infrared Navy cockpit videos — FLIR1 (2004), Gimbal (2015), and GoFast (2015) — reached a wide audience when The New York Times published two of them in December 2017, and the Department of Defense officially released all three in April 2020, stating the objects observed "remain characterized as unidentified." The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a Defense Department UAP effort of this period, is documented in AARO's later Historical Record Review. Congressional interest and reporting requirements set up the formal structures that followed — the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and, later, statutory annual reporting.

5 records

2020s

Current Period

The current period is the most densely documented in UAP history. ODNI delivered its Preliminary Assessment to Congress in June 2021 and has published annual UAP reports since 2022. The Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in July 2022, which has released case resolution reports, official imagery, its Historical Record Review (2024), and research papers. In 2024 the National Archives opened Record Group 615 — the government-wide UAP Records Collection established under Section 1841 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 (Public Law 118-31) — and the Department of War's PURSUE program began releasing document and video tranches in 2025. Most of this archive's records, full texts, and hosted media come from this period.

58 records

Every record links to its official source page. Many records also include an AI-assisted summary, a Chinese translation, machine-extracted full text, and a hosted preservation copy — see each record page for what is available.