575 Pilot UAP Reports to the FAA, 2007–2024: What the Data Shows

On the afternoon of February 3, 2023, the controllers at the FAA’s Kansas City en route center logged the same sighting over and over again. An Airbus A321 heading west at 32,000 feet saw a large balloon off its left side. A Boeing 737 heading north saw it off its right. A Falcon business jet at 43,000 feet put it somewhere above 50,000. By the end of the day the FAA had written up 49 reports, the most for any single date in the records the agency has handed to the National Archives. The reports themselves never use the word “China”. They didn’t need to.

That day is the sharpest spike in a dataset that is otherwise fairly quiet. It holds 575 reports from February 20, 2007 to October 26, 2024. They show what pilots and controllers actually say when they report something unidentified in the sky. They also show how rarely that something turns up on radar.

What the records are

The series is “Records from the Federal Aviation Administration Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena”, National Archives Identifier 493468575. It belongs to Record Group 615, the UAP records collection created under the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. The National Archives announced the FAA material on April 24, 2025, in the same release as records from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Each report is its own catalog item with a one- or two-page PDF.

The reports come in two formats. There are 374 FAA “Skywatch Incident Reports”, which are short, structured entries written up at the air-traffic facility. The other 201 are summaries from the FAA’s Washington Operations Center, the agency’s round-the-clock national desk. These arrived as scanned teletype-style bulletins that begin “PRELIM INFO FROM FAA OPS”, and many give a latitude and longitude. The two formats sometimes describe the same event, so 575 reports is not 575 separate sightings. On busy nights one sighting can also produce a separate report for every crew who called it in.

Most reports come through an ARTCC, an Air Route Traffic Control Center. These are the large regional centers that handle airliners at cruising height between airports. Each has a three-letter code, such as ZKC for Kansas City, ZDC for Washington or ZDV for Denver. Kansas City Center filed the most reports (56), followed by Washington (30), Denver (29) and Memphis (28). Heights are given as flight levels. FL450 means 45,000 feet on a standard pressure setting, and FL600 means 60,000 feet, well above the ceiling of most airliners. Where the operator type is recorded, commercial flights make up 256 of the Skywatch reports and general aviation 54. The aircraft types most often named are the ones you would see at any gate: the Boeing 737-800, the Airbus A321 and the A320.

The complete dataset, with every report’s date, facility, aircraft type, remarks and catalog link, can be downloaded here as a CSV file.

The timeline and the jump after 2021

For fourteen years the reports barely register. The collection opens with a February 2007 entry from Denver Center: at least twelve aircraft between 34,000 and 40,000 feet near Hayden, Colorado reported a UFO that “is apparently tracking the aircraft”, with no radar return (February 20, 2007). The early years also include an October 2009 log from Denver Center on the “balloon boy” hoax. It records a father phoning the center to say his six-year-old son had floated away in a homemade helium balloon made to look like a UFO (October 16, 2009). The boy was later found at home.

Year	Reports	Year	Reports
2007	5	2016	1
2008	2	2017	1
2009	3	2018	5
2010	3	2019	7
2011	1	2020	4
2012	3	2021	34
2013	1	2022	70
2014	2	2023	336
2015	4	2024	93

Only 42 reports come from 2007 to 2020. The other 533 date from 2021 onward, and 2023 on its own accounts for 336. This probably does not mean more strange things started flying. It means reporting changed. Between 2021 and 2022 the FAA formalised how pilots and controllers should report UAP, and it began passing reports to the Pentagon’s UAP office, first the UAP Task Force and then, from July 2022, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). You can see this in the reports themselves, which start to use a standard phrase (“Aircraft reported an unidentified aerial phenomenon…”) and stock closing lines about evasive action and law-enforcement notification.

Then came February 2023. The Chinese surveillance balloon crossed the continental United States in the first days of the month and was shot down off South Carolina on February 4. After NORAD adjusted its radars to pick up slow, small targets, US fighters shot down three more objects on February 10, 11 and 12, over northern Alaska, Canada’s Yukon and Lake Huron. The administration later said those three were probably harmless, likely private balloons. The FAA logged 118 reports that month, 52 of them mentioning a balloon.

Reading the reports

The February 3 cluster is less mysterious than it is useful as a record. Crew after crew over northwest Missouri, around St. Joseph, and neighbouring Kansas and Nebraska reported “a large balloon” with the same wording and the same estimate, “approximately FL500 and above”. A Boeing 737-800 passed right under it (February 3, 2023). An Airbus A319 crew said they saw the balloon drop 20,000 feet in altitude (February 3, 2023). No other report backs that up, and it may be a trick of perspective. One report stands out. It lists the aircraft as a U-2 at 60,000 feet, above the balloon and “circling balloon location” (February 3, 2023). US officials have since said U-2 flights were used to photograph the balloon. This entry shows controllers logging one of those flights as it happened.

The rest of that week shows what heightened attention does. On February 11, crews near Sioux Falls and over Iowa City reported lights “coming and going” and something “circling at or above their altitude”. The Iowa City entries end with a dry note from the FAA’s air-traffic security desk: the same report had come in the week before, “and it was a ‘train’ of satellites” (February 11, 2023).

Starlink explains a visible share of the dataset. About 48 reports mention Starlink or satellites. The clearest case is from February 7, 2023. Several crews 50 nautical miles north of Des Moines reported bright flashing lights “well above them”, and FAA staff matched them to a Starlink train of three or four groups of four satellites. NORAD agreed (February 7, 2023). Starlink satellites are usually launched in batches and spread out slowly, so for a while after launch they cross the sky as a line of lights. At cruising height, near dawn or dusk, they can catch sunlight while the ground below is dark. That is why a pilot can see them well while a controller’s radar shows nothing.

This leads to the typical report. On February 4, 2024 a Boeing 737-800 heading southeast at 41,000 feet over eastern Utah reported five separate “craft” with white lights between FL600 and FL800. The summary ends: “NO PRIMARY TARGETS OBSERVED ON RADAR” (February 4, 2024). The typical report has a light, or several, above the aircraft and hard to judge for distance. The crew take no evasive action and radar shows no return. Across the whole set, about 329 reports mention lights, about 112 put the object at or above FL450, about 167 say no evasive action was taken, and about 82 state outright that ATC radar showed nothing.

Only about 19 reports mention a radar or primary target, meaning a raw radar echo from something without a transponder. They are the most interesting group, and they are not all alike. In February 2019 Seattle Center saw a primary target moving at 20 knots near a flashing light. That is about the speed of a drifting balloon (February 10, 2019). In August 2023 a Boeing 737-800 near Florence, South Carolina reported three circling lights at 40,000 feet, and Jacksonville Center “did receive a primary RADAR target” at that position (August 12, 2023). The report says nothing more. In February 2023, near Washington, D.C., an unidentified primary target led to fighters being scrambled and Andrews going to battle stations for about half an hour. It left the restricted area with “no visual verification” (February 24, 2023). In one November 2023 case the crew itself said the lights showed the target was an aircraft, just one not talking to ATC (November 4, 2023).

The counts in this section are approximate. They come from text matches on the controllers’ remarks, which are abbreviated, inconsistently spelled and sometimes cut off, so treat them as a rough guide.

What the data establishes, and what it doesn’t

The records establish that experienced crews see things they can’t identify and report them through official channels. They show that the FAA took these reports seriously enough to log them, forward them and sometimes check them against satellite maps and NORAD. They show that one real, well-documented object, the February 2023 balloon, produced dozens of consistent reports from independent crews within hours. That is a good sign of how pilot reporting behaves when something really is there.

They do not show objects performing impossible manoeuvres, backed by instruments. Almost none of the reports include measured range, speed or altitude. Heights like “FL600” or “FL800” are guesses about a point of light with nothing nearby to judge it against, and a light’s apparent motion from a moving aircraft is notoriously misleading. Satellites and balloons account for a clear share. The rest is mostly reports that went unresolved, not reports that were found to be anomalous. The small group with radar returns deserves a closer look, but the records leave each case at a single line.

For how other agencies’ UAP material reached the same collection, see our page on the CBP UAP videos at the National Archives.

Sources

• National Archives Catalog, “Records from the Federal Aviation Administration Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena”, NAID 493468575: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/493468575
• National Archives, “Record Group 615: Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection”: https://www.archives.gov/research/topics/uaps/rg-615
• National Archives press release, “National Archives Releases UAP Records”, April 24, 2025: https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2025/nr25-07
• Spooky Valley dataset of all 575 reports (CSV): /data/faa-uap-reports-2007-2024.csv
• CBC News, coverage of the February 2023 shootdowns over the Yukon and Lake Huron: https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.6745783
• WSAZ / Associated Press, “US ends search for objects shot down over Alaska, Lake Huron”, February 17, 2023: https://www.wsaz.com/2023/02/17/us-officials-search-remnants-china-balloon-ends/