Record Group 615: A Guide to Every UAP Record at the National Archives

As of September 27, 2026, the National Archives’ Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection holds nine series from nine federal bodies: the Department of the Air Force, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of State, the National Security Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Together they contain more than seven hundred catalog items, from a 1945 bomber crew’s report of lights over the Pacific to an FBI interview in early 2025 about glowing orbs near O’Hare. This page is a guide to all of it. It explains what Record Group 615 is and which law created it, then goes through each series in turn, linking every record that has its own Spooky Valley page and naming the ones that do not.

RG 615 is an archive, not a revelation. Much of it was public for years before it reached the National Archives, and many files mention UFOs in a single paragraph out of hundreds of pages.

What Is a Record Group?

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) sorts the permanent records of the federal government into numbered record groups, usually one for each agency or bureau. Record Group 107 holds the records of the Office of the Secretary of War, Record Group 263 holds CIA records and Record Group 341 holds the records of Headquarters U.S. Air Force (the Air Staff).

Record Group 615, the “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection”, is defined by subject rather than by the agency that created the records. That matters because UAP records are scattered across the government. A single subject-based record group lets NARA gather an Air Force unit history, an FBI case file and a State Department cable in one place, while each series keeps the name of the agency that sent it. Each series has its own National Archives Identifier (NAID), and each item comes with metadata supplied by the agency, which becomes important later on this page.

The Law Behind It

The collection exists because of sections 1841 to 1843 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 (Public Law 118-31), signed on December 22, 2023. Those sections began as the UAP Disclosure Act, an amendment written by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Mike Rounds and modeled openly on the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The Senate version would have set up an independent review board, appointed by the President, with the power to push agencies to declassify records, and would have given the government eminent domain over any “recovered technologies of unknown origin” held by private companies.

Those provisions did not survive negotiations with the House. The law that passed kept the records collection and a presumption that records should be disclosed, but it dropped the independent review board and the eminent-domain clause. Each agency now identifies its own UAP records, reviews them and sends digital copies to NARA, and the executive branch keeps the power to postpone disclosure. NARA’s guidance to agencies, AC Memo 04.2025, covers the transfer of “publicly releasable” UAP records. In practice, the collection fills mainly with material the agencies had already decided could be seen.

NARA announced its first release on April 24, 2025 (press release nr25-07), with records from ODNI, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the FAA and the NRC. Since then it has added series on a rolling basis as agencies transfer them. The most recent were the Air Force transfer in late August 2026 and the CBP videos in mid-September 2026.

The JFK Comparison, Revisited

When the law passed, supporters compared it with the JFK Assassination Records Collection (Record Group 541). The comparison still helps, though mostly to show what is missing. The JFK Act created the Assassination Records Review Board, an independent panel that sat from 1994 to 1998, questioned agencies about their withholdings and could overrule them, subject only to presidential appeal. That board is the main reason millions of pages came out. RG 615 has no equivalent. The agencies review their own records.

The JFK collection also shows how slow such a process can be: its last large releases came in 2017 and 2025, decades after the law passed. The UAP subject is broader and closer to current military capabilities, so there is little reason to expect faster progress. What RG 615 offers now is one place to look and a legal expectation that more will follow.

What’s in the Collection Now

The series below run from the newest arrival to the oldest.

Department of the Air Force (August 2026)

The largest and oldest set of records in RG 615 is the Air Force transfer: thirty items catalogued on about August 27–28, 2026, under series NAID 656595571 (transfer TR-0615-2026-0003). Most are microfilmed records dating from 1945 to 1969. They are not a UFO file but Air Force records that turned up in a search for UFO content, which ranges from a full case file to none at all.

The two most substantial items are the histories of the 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron, the unit that took over UFO field investigations for Project Blue Book in 1953. The June 1955 history includes the paperwork behind that arrangement: the 1953 agreement that handed field work to the squadron, a November 1954 conference with J. Allen Hynek, the investigators’ guide, and a count of 306 reports. The June 1956 history has monthly summaries for the first half of 1956: 170 reports, none graded unknown, most attributed to balloons, aircraft and Venus. Neither history mentions Operation Moon Dust or Project Blue Fly, despite the claims about crash retrieval that often attach to this squadron.

Two items are regulations. Air Force Regulation 200-2 of July 1962, with a 1964 change and a local supplement, is the Blue Book-era rulebook that made base commanders responsible for UFO investigations and kept dealings with the press in one office. Alaskan Air Command Regulation 200-5 of December 1953 told units in Alaska to report “UFOBs” by teletype immediately, file a written report within three days and hold any debris for Wright-Patterson.

The correspondence files come from the Fourth Air Force at Hamilton Field, California, and survive as microfilm that is largely unreadable. The 1947 file covers the Maury Island hoax, the fatal B-25 crash at Kelso, Washington, Kenneth Arnold’s telegrams and an Arizona sighting. The 1949 file contains a witness sketch of an object near the Cowlitz River and a set of press clippings. The 1952 file follows a newspaper sighting from the FBI to Wright-Patterson, includes a follow-up report dismissed as unverifiable, and carries wire copy on the Salem Coast Guard photograph. General William F. McKee’s personal correspondence, 1951–1967, runs to 296 pages and has one UFO passage: a July 1952 letter saying the saucer boom was back and that “even our radars” were picking up unidentified objects. The Curtis LeMay Collection, 1945–1947, has no UFO content at all. It covers Project RAND, operations analysis and a bombing-survey conference, and it was probably swept in because it shares a microfilm reel with the MacDill history described below.

Three items are intelligence reporting rather than unit history. The “Estimate of the Situation” of September 8, 1948 is not Project Sign’s famous Estimate of the Situation, the 1948 document that argued for an interplanetary explanation and was reportedly rejected by General Hoyt Vandenberg. It is a Fifth Air Force intelligence digest from occupied Japan with one UFO item: about twenty grey spheroids seen over Fielding Lake, Alaska, on July 9, 1948. The shared title will mislead anyone who reads only the catalog entry. The Fifth Air Force daily intelligence summaries of June 1952 record a spinning silver disc over Kimpo and an F-94 chasing a brilliant light, along with a glowing “object” that turned out to be a North Korean balloon. “Lights Seen Over Japan” is a May 1945 B-24 mission report of two glowing objects shadowing the bomber between Truk and Guam, which the Air Force’s chief historian sent to the Director of Intelligence in January 1953.

Sixteen items are unit histories whose UFO material is usually a paragraph or two in a long administrative record. Among the air defense histories, the 30th Air Division’s 1950 history records Atomic Energy Commission guards who saw a silent, bullet-shaped object hovering by a gate on October 15, 1950, and its 1951 history has two pages of “Unusual Flying Objects” over the Midwest, including a square object over Oak Ridge that F-47s failed to intercept. The 34th Air Division’s 1952 history describes an “overwhelming number” of reports around Albuquerque and Los Alamos and a briefing by Captain Edward Ruppelt. The 20th Air Division’s late-1957 history gives one paragraph to more than twenty reports. The 6th Air Division’s July 1952 history describes a crew climbing to 20,000 feet over MacDill after the tower reported high-altitude objects. The 57th Fighter-Interceptor Wing’s 1950 history records five radar men watching a reddish-orange light hover over Elmendorf for five minutes. The 78th Fighter Wing’s 1964 history notes a rise in reports around San Francisco Bay and files a newspaper story about a glowing “flying submarine.”

The bomber, reconnaissance and support histories are similar. The 27th Fighter-Escort Wing’s 1950 history from Bergstrom mentions saucer calls to the intelligence office but describes no sighting, and the same wing’s December 1952 history records an object over northern Japan while the wing was on rotation there. The 72d Strategic Reconnaissance Wing’s April 1953 history is the exception: it binds in a complete UFO file on a brilliant object over Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico, on April 8, 1953, with five signed witness statements. The 95th Bombardment Wing’s 1960 history includes the full AFR 200-2 message on a glowing object that passed close to an alert B-52 at Biggs AFB. The MacDill Field history for July 1947 runs to 970 pages, and its UFO content is a Lakeland man bringing a homemade “flying disc” model to the intelligence office. The 178th Fighter Bomber Squadron’s 1951 history recalls the 1948 Gorman dogfight from inside the North Dakota Air Guard and says the Geiger-counter checks found “apparently nothing.” The 1909th Airways and Air Communications Squadron history gives one paragraph to the July 1952 Washington flap as seen from the Andrews tower. The Chanute Technical Training Center’s 1960 history describes six local investigations and a Moondust alert. The 62d Military Airlift Wing’s 1969 history records the end of Project Blue Book as seen from McChord AFB, where the base UFO officer kept following the rules because no order had come to stop.

Two items are hard to explain. RAND’s “A Survey of Exobiology” (1963) is a serious scientific survey of life beyond Earth that never mentions UFOs or flying saucers. “I Once Saw a Flying Saucer” (1966) is a newspaper column by retired General Ira Eaker about a “golden disc” that turned out to be a DC-3, filed with the Blue Book fact sheet and briefing papers the Pentagon sent him while he was writing it.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (September 2026)

The newest series, NAID 665701604, holds twelve CBP videos catalogued on about September 18–19, 2026. None of them is newly released. CBP posted the clips on its own FOIA page in August 2023, and The Black Vault reported them the following month. All twelve are covered on one page, the CBP UAP videos at the National Archives. One clip, the April 2013 Aguadilla infrared footage, has its own full case page, the Aguadilla, Puerto Rico UAP, which includes AARO’s 2025 conclusion that the objects were most likely sky lanterns.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (May 2026)

The FBI series, NAID 580705010, has six items that reached the catalog in May 2026. They are among the most recent records in the collection: Guardian threat-assessment files opened in 2024 and 2025 and closed without any finding of a threat. Three items make up the Anoka, Minnesota police UAP case, which covers officers’ observation on February 19, 2025, the Cincinnati opening communication, the Minneapolis closing communication with a witness interview, and material from Americans for Safe Aerospace and NUFORC. The other three make up the Rolling Meadows, Illinois orbs case: a National Threat Operations Center tip about glowing orbs near O’Hare on December 20, 2024, queries to drone-detection sensors, an FD-302 witness interview of January 7, 2025, with phone screenshots and video, and the closure.

Department of State (February and May 2026)

The State Department series, NAID 608806625, has thirteen cables in two batches. Eight cables from the 1980s reached the catalog in February 2026. Five later cables followed in May 2026, and the same five had already been published in the Pentagon’s PURSUE Release 01.

Pages from the older batch pair cables with their replies where possible. The Barbados UFOs and Cosmos 1873 covers the Bridgetown report of up to seven objects on September 1, 1987, and Washington’s answer that Space Command had matched them to a decaying Soviet rocket body. The same page summarizes two small items without their own pages: a July 1987 query from Lomé about a burning object, which has no reply in the file, and a 1989 Africa Bureau weekly report with one paragraph on metal fragments in Mali, probably from an American rocket. The Kuwait Airways light phenomenon covers a June 1980 crew report of a vast hemisphere of light. Strange lights over Afghanistan covers a 1981 cable about high-intensity lights over Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. The Argentine “Firewheel” cables combine a 1980 report on Argentine press stories with a 1984 cable about a fireball over Resistencia that Argentina’s space commission attributed to a Soviet satellite re-entry.

The five newer cables already had pages from PURSUE. They cover Papua New Guinea’s 1985 overflight inquiry, a Tajik Air crew’s 1994 sighting over Kazakhstan, the 2001 “UFOs over Georgia” cable about Kodori Gorge overflights dismissed as UFOs, Turkmenistan’s Union of UFOlogists in 2004, and a 2023 Mexico political summary that mentions Jaime Maussan’s September 2023 congressional hearing.

National Security Agency (December 2025)

The NSA series, NAID 580103959, has 38 items. The NSA itself had released all of them online in 2021, and they reached the NARA catalog by December 2025. It mixes sighting reports, State Department airgrams, technical-journal articles, a FOIA lawsuit and magazine reprints.

The lawsuit is covered on one page, CAUS v. NSA, which pairs Eugene Yeates’s public affidavit of September 1980, explaining why NSA withheld its intercept-derived UFO reports, with Judge Gerhard Gesell’s November 1980 order granting NSA summary judgment. Two of the four non-intercept documents Yeates described are in the series as drafts: the 1968 “UFO Hypothesis and Survival Questions” and the “Intelligence Community Blind Spot” memo. Three items come from NSA’s technical journal: Lambros Callimahos’s 1965 article on reading extraterrestrial messages, and Howard Campaigne’s 1966 puzzle of invented messages from space together with his 1969 key, both on one Campaigne page.

The sighting reports include the 1955 Northeast Air Command UFOB file, with RB-47 radar contacts over the Canadian Arctic, a 1958 Canal Zone case and a 1969 RC-135 report. That 1969 report describes the same light as the USNS Muller sighting off Havana. The series also holds the Guantánamo Bay object, photographed by sailors and possibly a decaying Soviet satellite, and the Congo metal fragment, which analysts identified as part of an overheated electric motor or generator armature.

The State Department airgrams are the 1965 Antarctic sightings reported from Buenos Aires, the Montevideo eclipse “saucer” slides, the TAP airliner sighting over Angola, the Nemuro and General Terán space-object airgrams, Moscow’s “Flying Saucers Are a Myth” airgram of 1968, and the 1969 “Tunisian firefall”, whose page also covers a one-line 1975 reply from Tunis saying there had been no recent reports. Several familiar government documents are also in the series and are covered on existing pages. Three items on the 1976 Tehran F-4 incident, namely the report to the Joint Chiefs, the DIA routing slip and Captain Henry Shields’s “Now You See It, Now You Don’t!”, belong to the Tehran jets case. The 1994 Air Force Roswell report and the 1995 GAO records search for Representative Steven Schiff are covered in the Roswell guide, and USAF Fact Sheet 95-03 is covered in the Project Blue Book history.

About a third of the NSA series has no page because it holds nothing new. There are four Frontiers of Science reprints from 1981 (including Richard Hall’s “Is the CIA Stonewalling?” and Peter Gersen’s piece on what the government knows), a Patrick Huyghe magazine article, a 1978 magazine abstract on the Iran case, a National Enquirer clipping about an NSA “sneak invasion” warning, and 1987 New York Times and UPI clippings on the MJ-12 controversy. There is also a one-page abstract of a 1978 GEPAN report, the JANAP 146 manual for CIRVIS sighting reports, a Defense Documentation Center bibliography, a 1965 Mexicali political roundup that mentions flying saucers only in its table of contents, and a 1966 request from the Ottawa embassy for American UFO publications for Canada’s Library of Parliament. They show what NSA kept on file, not any incident.

Federal Aviation Administration (April 2025)

The FAA series, NAID 493468575, was part of NARA’s first release on April 24, 2025. It contains 575 pilot and air-traffic reports from February 2007 to October 2024, in two formats: Skywatch reports and Washington Operations Center summaries. The same sighting often appears in both formats, and again for each crew that reported it, so 575 reports is not 575 sightings. The series is covered as a searchable data set on the FAA UAP reports, 2007–2024, and the full table can be downloaded as a CSV.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission (April 2025)

The NRC series, NAID 488808322, also came out in April 2025. It has nine items, and eight of them are internal policy documents from 2022 and 2023 on whether and how nuclear licensees should report UAP. They are gathered on one page, the NRC’s UAP flyover reporting policy. The material includes an August 2023 briefing proposing a UAP category in the Suspicious Incident Database, Daryl Johnson’s slides, email threads with AARO and with Canada’s nuclear regulator, a rule-writing team that decided “manned or unmanned” aircraft already covered the case, and a December 2023 summary memo. The ninth item has more of a story to it: the Pilgrim nuclear plant object of 2015, in which regional staff exchanged emails about an unidentified object over the Plymouth plant, a State Police helicopter was sent up, and no Suspicious Incident Database report was ever filed.

Office of the Director of National Intelligence (April 2025)

The ODNI series, NAID 493468579, has four items, all official reports that had already been published. They are the June 2021 Preliminary Assessment (144 reports), the 2022 Annual Report (510 reports as of August 30, 2022), the FY2023 Consolidated Annual Report (291 new reports, 801 in total), and the FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report.

Office of the Secretary of Defense (April 2025)

The OSD series, NAID 493468580, has thirty items, mostly AARO’s public output. The case resolutions are the most useful. The collection holds AARO’s analyses of the Southeast Asia “triangles” (fishing nets in satellite images), the “atmospheric wakes” (sensor artifacts), the Eglin cone-shaped object (very likely a balloon), the “Western United States” lights (airliners up to 300 nautical miles away), the GoFast video (an object at about 13,000 feet whose apparent speed came from parallax) and the Aguadilla “Puerto Rico Object” (probably sky lanterns). The case slides from the November 2024 Senate hearing are on the Rafael Hernández airport page.

The series also holds research and history. There is AARO’s Historical Record Report, Volume 1. There is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory analysis of a metallic specimen, the magnesium-zinc-bismuth “1947 crash” fragment, which proved terrestrial; its page also covers AARO’s July 2024 supplement. There are two draft papers from 2023, Loeb and Kirkpatrick’s “Physical Constraints on UAP” and a sky-view study of 98,724 NUFORC reports, and two AARO information papers, on forced perspective and parallax and on Starlink satellite flaring. The policy record includes the 2023 CAPCO memo that allowed witnesses bound by nondisclosure agreements to talk to AARO, and the transcript of the April 2023 Senate Armed Services hearing with Sean Kirkpatrick. The OSD copies of the FY2023 and FY2024 annual reports duplicate the ODNI items above, and Jon Kosloski’s November 2024 hearing statement is discussed on the FY2024 report page.

Eleven OSD items have no page because they are handouts and slide decks with no case content of their own. They are the 2024 and 2025 AARO trifold leaflets, Timothy Phillips’s biography and his 2025 DGI conference deck, the AARO mission brief, the May 2023 presentation to NASA’s independent study team, a single slide of reporting trends to November 2023, the 2023 backgrounder and slide deck on the Defense Department’s UAP mission, Kirkpatrick’s slides for the April 2023 hearing (the cases in them are covered elsewhere), and his civil-aviation deck.

Reading These Records Honestly

The most important fact about RG 615 is that most of it is not new disclosure. The NSA files were public in 2021, the CBP videos in 2023, the five later State cables through PURSUE, and the ODNI and AARO documents on the day they were published. The collection preserves them and makes them easier to find. That is useful, but it is not the release of records the government had been hiding. The material that is mostly new to the public is the Air Force transfer, the FBI case files and the eight older State cables, and even the Air Force records were drawn from unit histories that historians could already request.

The Air Force records also need to be read in proportion. A 970-page base history with one paragraph about a man carrying a model disc shows that the saucer craze reached MacDill. It does not show that MacDill had a UFO problem. A unit history records what a unit’s historian thought worth noting, and in the late 1940s and 1950s UFO reports were part of ordinary work. Where the files give an explanation, it is usually ordinary: Venus, balloons, satellites, aircraft, a contrail.

The catalog metadata has errors, so check the record against the catalog before relying on the catalog. The NSA’s Guantánamo report is catalogued as August 1964, but the event happened in August 1968. The COMNAVSECGRU “Visual Sighting Report, April 30, 1979” is catalogued under its declassification date, while the sighting it describes took place off Havana on August 22, 1969. The Air Force’s December 1952 history of the 27th Fighter-Escort Wing is catalogued at Austin, although the wing was at Misawa, Japan. The Hamilton Field correspondence file for 1949 is stamped with the 1947 file’s microfilm number. And one CBP clip is labelled “Aguadilla PR” although its frames show dry scrubland.

None of this means the collection should be dismissed, only that it should be read one document at a time. RG 615 is still filling, and a single well-documented file, such as the 72d Reconnaissance Wing’s Fort Buchanan statements, is worth more than a hundred clippings. This guide will be updated as new series arrive.

Sources

• National Archives: Record Group 615, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection
• National Archives press release nr25-07, “National Archives Releases UAP Records,” April 24, 2025
• Department of the Air Force series, NAID 656595571
• U.S. Customs and Border Protection series, NAID 665701604
• Federal Bureau of Investigation series, NAID 580705010
• Department of State series, NAID 608806625
• National Security Agency series, NAID 580103959
• Federal Aviation Administration series, NAID 493468575
• Nuclear Regulatory Commission series, NAID 488808322
• Office of the Director of National Intelligence series, NAID 493468579
• Office of the Secretary of Defense series, NAID 493468580