Case File · Nuclear Regulatory Commission · AARO Disclosure Era (2022-present) Released April 2025 · National Archives, Record Group 615

How the Nuclear Regulator Handled UAP Flyover Reporting, 2022–2023

UFO Government Report

When Congress ordered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to count UAP over nuclear sites, one security specialist pushed for a new reporting category. His managers decided the existing drone rules already covered it.

May 2022 – December 2023
Rockville, Maryland, USA

What this record is

Eight items in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s UAP series at the National Archives record a single internal argument: whether, and how, the agency that licenses America’s nuclear plants should ask them to report unidentified anomalous phenomena. None describes a sighting. Together they show a small bureaucratic fight over a new law.

The earliest is a May–June 2022 email thread in which a Canadian regulator asks the NRC about drone and UAP reporting. At the centre are a decision briefing (“BLUF”) from August 2023 and a slide deck, both by Daryl Johnson, a senior security specialist in the Security Oversight and Support Branch of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response (NSIR). Four email threads from August to November 2023 cover his exchanges with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the regulation’s drafters and his own managers. The last item is a December 2023 memo in which Johnson set out his concerns for his acting branch chief.

The briefing and the slides were among three NRC documents the National Archives released on 24 April 2025, the first NRC transfer to the collection. The email threads, which the NRC had already put into its public ADAMS document system in 2024, carry the National Archives’ section 1843 redaction markings and were in the catalog by early 2026. A related 2015 email chain about an object over the Pilgrim nuclear plant has its own page.

What it says

The Canadian thread comes first. On 19 May 2022 Kathleen Heppell-Masys, director general of security and safeguards at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, asked the NRC how its nuclear security reporting rules dealt with drones and UAP, and whether any UAP events near Canadian facilities had been reported to the NRC in the previous five years. The NRC’s reply of 20 May said that, like Canada’s, its regulations did not specifically address drones or UAP. Reporting of suspicious activity was voluntary, but a new section, 10 CFR 73.1215, would make it mandatory once the Enhanced Weapons Rule took effect. In June an acting NSIR director noted that the question had been about UAP while the answer “mainly refers to UAS.”

The trigger for the 2023 debate was the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. Among the contents it required in the annual UAP report to Congress was, “in consultation with the Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the number of reported incidents, and descriptions thereof, of unidentified anomalous phenomena or drones of unknown origin” at nuclear power stations, fuel storage sites and other NRC-regulated facilities. The briefing records that AARO first asked the NRC for flyover data on 1 May 2023 and that NSIR answered on 5 June 2023.

Johnson’s August 2023 briefing argued that the NRC had no category for UAP in its Suspicious Incident Database and had never told licensees what a UAP was. Licensees might report one as a drone or not report it at all, so “we have no idea if UAPs are flying over the aerospace of nuclear power plants or Category I fuel cycle facilities.” He listed characteristics that distinguished UAP from aircraft and drones: no visible propulsion, no sound, unusual manoeuvres and operation in water as well as air. He proposed asking AARO for its reporting guidance, writing UAP guidance for licensees, issuing a security advisory and perhaps a rulemaking. He estimated the workload as negligible, noting that drone flyover reports ran at 12 to 25 a year. On 16 August he asked his AARO contact whether it had guidance for agencies; the reply, from a sender whose name is redacted, said the report would be annual and that there was some guidance it would be happy to share. In October he was still chasing it.

The rule-writers took a different view. When a colleague asked on 16 August whether UAP guidance belonged in the regulatory guides being revised for the Enhanced Weapons Rule, Greg Bowman, copied on the thread, replied: “Does the current rule require licensees to report UFOs?” If not, he wrote, using a guide “to expand the scope of the rule is a non-starter.” Phil Brochman, who drafted the rule, suggested it might already be enough. It required reporting of “manned aerial activity, and unmanned aerial activity,” and if “manned” meant crewed by humans, then “unmanned” could be read as “either uncrewed or crewed by non-humans.” He also asked whether the law reached every kind of licensee, such as research reactors and fuel-fabrication sites. On 17 August Bowman asked the team to stand down until after a public meeting, worried that UFOs would be “a distractor.” In September Johnson pointed out that the statute’s phrase “other sites or facilities regulated by” the NRC covered fuel facilities too.

By November Johnson was frustrated. He told his acting branch chief, Jesse Rollins, that he had briefed two senior NSIR managers in September and they had been “kinda passive,” telling him to screen existing reports for UAP characteristics even though the reports rarely held enough detail. As a result, “anything not resembling a fixed wing or rotary aircraft is assumed to be a drone/UAS.” His December memo went further. It rated the agency’s reputational risk as high, said the kinetic and non-kinetic threat from UAP was unknown and should be assessed by the NRC’s intelligence unit, and complained that leadership had seemed “dismissive” and had refused a security advisory, a new database category and a survey of licensee sensors. He warned that Congress might learn of UAP flyovers at licensed sites from other agencies, and that the NRC’s data to AARO could not be accurate because licensees had never been asked to collect it.

Context

The outcome is visible in what AARO later published. Its Fiscal Year 2024 consolidated annual report, released in November 2024, said it had received 18 reports from the National Nuclear Security Administration and the NRC about incidents near U.S. nuclear infrastructure, and that those agencies had categorised all of them as drones. That is exactly the result Johnson predicted: without a UAP category, everything became a UAS. It is also possible the classification was simply correct. Drone flyovers of nuclear plants are a well-documented problem (see the Nevada National Security Site incursion), and nothing in these files describes a flyover that was not a drone. After leaving the NRC, Johnson spoke publicly in 2026 about the flyover data he had tracked.

The files are useful for what they reveal about process. The NRC’s managers were not denying that anything flew over nuclear plants. They were deciding that a new law about reporting did not justify expanding a safety rule they had just finished, and that the existing wording already covered anything airborne and unauthorised.

Status

These are policy papers, not incident reports, and they settle nothing about what flies over nuclear sites. They show that in 2023 the NRC chose to treat UAP as a subset of suspicious aerial activity under its existing rule, not as a separate category, over the objections of the staff member responsible for its flyover data. Whether that choice hid anything is exactly what the records cannot answer.

Sources

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