About this archive

What this archive is

UFO Dossier is a searchable archive of publicly released U.S. government records of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), from the PURSUE releases at war.gov/UFO. PURSUE is the Pentagon program that published these files. We are not affiliated with the U.S. government. The original files are theirs.

The counts on the homepage are three different things: official files, passages checked against those files, and the sightings those passages describe. One sighting can show up in more than one passage.

How a record gets here

1. We start from the public list of PURSUE files.
2. The original file is kept.
3. We use the text in the file. If that text cannot be read, the pages are read with optical character recognition.
4. Each file is noted as a sighting report, program paperwork, or a photo, video, or audio file.
5. A short reading is written from the file, always tied to a quote copied from it.
6. The quote is checked against the file. A paraphrase or an invented sentence is dropped.
7. A passage that is too thin to stand as a case is dropped.
8. Passages that describe the same sighting are grouped. A photo, a video, or a later analysis can belong to that sighting without becoming a second case. A set of related sightings, such as the Western U.S. reports from 2023, stays a set.
9. Search and the public pages keep a file, a passage, and a sighting distinct.

Passages, sightings, and files

A passage is one checked quote and the details taken from it. A sighting is the episode those passages describe. A series, such as the Western U.S. reports from 2023, is a set of sightings, not one giant sighting. The source is the government file itself. A photo or a later write-up can belong to a sighting without becoming a second case.

Colorado Springs in 2022 is the worked example: one sighting, the main account, a photo or video, and a later analysis. The photo or video is not a separate case.

What we do not claim

This site does not claim that UAPs are extraterrestrial, that the U.S. government has recovered alien technology, or that any single incident has a paranormal explanation. The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which reviewed many of these incidents officially, has reached no such conclusion either. The dataset is observational — what was seen, by whom, with what sensors, and what remained unresolved.

Limits and known gaps

When a document is ambiguous, the reading can mislabel the sensor or the service branch. Those fields are marked unknown rather than guessed.

Heavily redacted documents may produce cases with very few details. They are still listed, because the file exists even when most of it is blacked out.

Roughly 60% of incidents could be placed on the map; the rest lack precise coordinates in the source text and appear in lists but not on the map. Older FBI case files often describe sightings without specific geographic detail.

Videos and audio in this version are linked as official sources. This site does not invent a transcript when the release did not include one.