The CBP UAP Videos at the National Archives (2013–2021)

Most of these twelve videos show nothing you could point at. The longest runs for more than fifteen minutes of grey infrared scrubland seen from an aircraft, with the on-screen readouts covered by green boxes, and no object is obvious at the start, middle or end. Yet the set also includes one of the most argued-over pieces of government UAP footage ever filmed, and in September 2026 all twelve became permanent federal records in the National Archives.

What the series is and how it got there

The series is titled “Records from U.S. Customs and Border Protection Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” and carries National Archives Catalog identifier 665701604. It belongs to Record Group 615, the UAP records collection the National Archives set up under the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. The agency’s transfer is logged as TR-0615-2026-0009, and the twelve items appeared in the catalog on September 18 and 19, 2026. Our briefing on the NDA waivers and the new archive series places the transfer alongside the other UAP news of those weeks.

None of this footage is new. The agency-supplied metadata marks every item “Files on CBP.gov”, and that is accurate. CBP’s FOIA library has a page titled “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon” that lists the same numbering, Video 1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2 and 4 through 10. According to the dates on that page, the video files were posted on August 10 and 15, 2023, a combined PDF of records followed on August 28, and the page was last modified on August 29, 2023. The metadata also gives a review date of January 31, 2023, months before anything went online. Few people noticed the upload until an X user posting as Dr.Disclosure89 flagged it to The Black Vault, which reported it on September 21, 2023. The Black Vault said it could not tell whether CBP had published the material on its own initiative or in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, and that no one at CBP was available to comment. NBC News covered the release the next day. Its summary quoted Christopher Mellon, a former Pentagon intelligence official, as saying the videos would help the public understand why UAP are a national security issue.

The National Archives transfer is therefore a change of custody, not a disclosure. The footage has been public for three years. What has changed is that it now sits in a permanent, catalogued federal collection with stable identifiers, and that matters for researchers even though it adds nothing to what anyone can see.

Seven of the twelve file titles end in “_redacted”, but the archive lists every item as “Released in Full”. Both are true in their way. The frames are complete, but the flight data burned into them, such as coordinates, altitude and sensor angles, has been blurred or boxed out. That data is exactly what an analyst would need to work out how far away anything was.

The November 2019 airborne passes

Five items share the date November 23, 2019: CBP’s Videos 1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1 and 3.2. The first is a short clip of just under two minutes. The other four are long, running from 14 minutes 23 seconds to 15 minutes 36 seconds. All five are airborne infrared views looking down on dry, hilly scrub. Several parts of the frame in Video 1 are blurred out, and the later four carry heavy green redaction boxes over the on-screen data. In the stills sampled at the start, middle and end of each clip, no object is obvious. That does not rule out something small appearing between those points, but nothing in the stills justifies a claim that one does.

One detail in the metadata does not add up. Video 2.1 is listed with the location “Aguadilla PR”, while the other four have no location at all. The terrain in the sampled frames looks like dry scrubland, and nothing in them confirms Puerto Rico. The label may be a filing error, but it cannot be settled from the record alone.

The Arizona sky clips of April 2021

Four short clips, Videos 4 through 7, are listed as filmed in Arizona. Three are dated April 1, 2021 and one April 14, 2021. They are the only videos in the series that point at open sky rather than the ground. Video 4 runs 44 seconds against a noisy grey infrared background. A small dark object appears in it, and in one frame it looks like an elongated dark shape. Video 5 runs just under a minute and shows a single small bright point. Video 6 runs 71 seconds and shows a small bright point that later becomes a brighter oval spot.

Video 7, from April 14, shows dark silhouettes against the sky, and at least one of them is plainly shaped like a fixed-wing aircraft, with wings and fuselage visible. Whatever else is in that clip, the series includes footage of an ordinary-looking airplane.

These clips show the basic problem with sensor video. A dot or smudge on an infrared screen has no known size unless you know its distance, and without the range data that the redactions hide, a small object close to the camera and a large one far away look the same. Apparent speed has the same problem, and so does apparent motion when the camera platform is itself moving. None of these clips can show that anything was large, fast or unusual.

The “Topowa Bruja” clip, February 2020

Video 8, dated February 3, 2020 and running 86 seconds, gives its location as “Topowa Bruja”. It is a low-angle or ground-level infrared view across an open field, with many small dark shapes scattered over it and dense on-screen data. The place name is close to Topawa, a community on the Tohono O’odham Nation in southern Arizona, and bruja is Spanish for “witch”, but the metadata does not explain the name. It should not be confused with the separate airborne clip known as “La Bruja”, which press coverage dates to May 2021. Nothing in the sampled frames picks out any of the shapes as a subject.

The Aguadilla video, April 2013

Video 9 is the best known. It runs 3 minutes 55 seconds and shows airborne infrared footage with a “GROUND TRACK” readout and a “26AP2013” date stamp. This is the footage of April 26, 2013 near Rafael Hernández Airport in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, filmed from a DHS aircraft. The stamp probably uses UTC, which would explain why many accounts date the sighting to the local evening of April 25. The case has its own master page on Aguadilla, so it gets only a summary here. A 2015 study by the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies argued that no conventional explanation fit the object’s behaviour. On March 20, 2025, AARO published a case resolution report assessing “with moderate confidence” that the objects were sky lanterns, and stated that they “did not exhibit anomalous speeds or other behavior exceeding known state-of-the-art performance characteristics.” The copy now in the National Archives is the same footage both sides analysed.

The port-of-entry camera, November 2014

Video 10, dated November 1, 2014 and running three minutes, comes from a fixed camera at a U.S. port of entry. The metadata withholds the location under FOIA Exemption b7E, which covers law enforcement techniques and procedures. The sampled frames show border-crossing buildings, traffic lanes and trucks. No object is obvious in those stills, and the record gives no indication of what the camera operator thought was worth saving.

What the collection amounts to

Taken together, the series is a modest archive. Five long passes over scrubland show no clear object in the sampled frames. Four sky clips show dots and dark shapes, and one of them shows something that looks like an aircraft. A field clip has an unexplained place name, a port-of-entry recording shows an ordinary crossing, and there is one famous video whose leading official explanation is sky lanterns. None of it comes with the range data, radar tracks or witness reports that would be needed to test an extraordinary claim. The collection’s value is as a permanent record: it shows what a border-security agency chose to save and label as unidentified, and it now has a permanent home in the National Archives.

Sources

The series and each item can be checked in the National Archives Catalog, alongside CBP’s original FOIA posting and the contemporary reporting cited above.

• Series, National Archives Catalog NAID 665701604: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/665701604
• Agency-provided metadata (TR-0615-2026-0009): https://www.archives.gov/files/research/topics/UAP/tr-0615-2026-0009-cbp-uap.csv
• Video 1, November 23, 2019: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/667114526
• Video 2.1, November 23, 2019: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/667114528
• Video 2.2, November 23, 2019: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/667114530
• Video 3.1, November 23, 2019: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/667114533
• Video 3.2, November 23, 2019: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/667114535
• Video 4, Arizona, April 1, 2021: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/667114537
• Video 5, Arizona, April 1, 2021: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/667114550
• Video 6, Arizona, April 1, 2021: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/667114552
• Video 7, Arizona, April 14, 2021: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/667114554
• Video 8, “Topowa Bruja”, February 3, 2020: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/667114556
• Video 9, Aguadilla, April 26, 2013: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/667114558
• Video 10, port of entry, November 1, 2014: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/667114560
• CBP FOIA library, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon”: https://www.cbp.gov/document/foia-record/unidentified-aerial-phenomenon
• The Black Vault, “UAP Documents and Videos Surface from U.S. Customs and Border Protection” (September 21, 2023): https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/uap-documents-and-videos-surface-from-u-s-customs-and-border-protection/
• NBC News, “CBP releases videos of unidentified aerial phenomena” (September 22, 2023): https://www.nbcnews.com/now/video/cbp-releases-videos-of-unidentified-aerial-phenomena-193517125723
• The Black Vault, on AARO’s Puerto Rico case resolution report (March 20, 2025): https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/dod-report-says-aguadilla-ufo-was-just-sky-lanterns-previous-scientific-studies-claim-otherwise/