How to Actually Use These Records

This collection rewards patience and punishes assumptions. Here is what is worth knowing before you start.

Everything hangs on the NAID

Every description in the National Archives Catalog has a National Archives Identifier, and it is the only stable way to refer to a record. Titles repeat — there are two entirely different records called "USAF UFO sightings, California" — and titles change. NAIDs do not. Every record page on this site shows the NAID and links to the same record in NARA's own catalog, so you can always verify what you are reading against the source.

The five groupings

NARA organises the bulk downloads by the kind of material and the office that holds it, and the practical differences between them are large:

• Textual records and microfilm — the bulk of it, and where the case files live.
• Still pictures — photographic series. Note the wrinkle below.
• Moving images and sound — films, newsreels, and interview recordings.
• Electronic records — born-digital PDFs from the recent NDAA transfers.
• Presidential libraries — White House correspondence and casework, mostly

citizens writing to presidents.

Four defects to know about

These are real problems in the published data, not in your reading of it. We hit all four building this site.

1. One of NARA's own metadata files is invalid. The export for the sanitized case-file series is missing a comma between two records, which makes it fail a strict JSON parse. We verified our copy is byte-identical to the server, so the defect is upstream. If your tooling chokes on that file, this is why.

2. File sizes in the metadata are frequently fake. A large share of digital objects carry the placeholder value 12345678 where a byte count belongs. Summing that field produces a confident, meaningless total. Treat object sizes as unknown unless you have fetched the file.

3. Some series have no item-level records at all. The four Still Pictures series and the four Electronic Records series publish only a top-level description. There is no per-image metadata and no per-image URL — the only way to the content is to download the zip. For every other series, individual files are directly addressable.

4. Titles carry transcription noise, not just data. [illegible] and [blank] appear where the original typescript had faded. State names are abbreviated inconsistently — Penna, N.J., Tenn, T.H. for Territory of Hawaii — and misspelled often. Any search that assumes clean data will under-return.

Restrictions

Eleven of the collections listed by NARA are not available online, generally for copyright or other intellectual-property reasons. For those, the catalog description exists but the content does not, and viewing requires arrangements with NARA — for moving images, at the Moving Image and Sound Research Room at College Park, Maryland.

A word on what you are handling

These are public records of the United States government, and that is why this site can reproduce them. The witness statements in the case files, though, were written by private individuals who reported something to their government and had no expectation of being read by strangers seventy years later. They deserve to be quoted accurately and characterised fairly.