Why These Files Exist Now

Most of the documents in this archive are old. The reason you can read them together, in one place, is not.

Sections 1841 through 1843 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 — Public Law 118-31 — directed the National Archives and Records Administration to establish a single Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection.¹ NARA created Record Group 615 to hold it.²

The statutory language is broad. The collection is to consist of copies of all Government, Government-provided, or Government-funded records relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence.² That last phrase is not tabloid embroidery; it is the language Congress used.

The deadlines that shape this archive

The law set a schedule, and the schedule is why this collection looks the way it does today:

• Each federal agency had to review, identify and organise every UAP record in its

custody by October 20, 2024.²

• Agencies were to transfer digital copies of publicly disclosable records to NARA

by September 30, 2025.²

• Agencies began transferring on a rolling basis, and NARA continues to add to

Record Group 615 and publish through its online Catalog as material arrives.²

Rolling is the operative word. This is not a finished collection with a fixed table of contents. It is an accumulating one.

What that means for a reader

Two consequences follow, and both matter more than any single document.

First, absence is not evidence. If an agency's records are not here, the possibilities include: the agency has not transferred them yet, the records were withheld under the law's exemptions, they were never created, or they were destroyed decades ago under an ordinary records schedule. A gap in this archive is a gap in a transfer pipeline, not a finding about the universe.

Second, the collection changes underneath you. NARA states it refreshes the bulk downloads at least three times a year, and may do so more often as material is added.³ A citation to "the UAP collection" without a date is a citation to a moving target. Every record page on this site therefore carries its National Archives Identifier, and this site records the date it last checked NARA for changes.

The older material is a different animal

Alongside the new RG 615 transfers sits something else: the historical sediment. The single largest body of material here is the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book case files, which run from 1947 to 1969 and were retired to the National Archives long before anyone wrote the phrase "unidentified anomalous phenomena" into a defense bill.⁴

Those two strata — a 1950s Air Force filing system and a 2020s statutory disclosure collection — sit side by side in the same catalog. They were created by different people, for different reasons, under different rules, and they should not be read as though they were one continuous record. Most of what follows on this site is an attempt to keep them straight.