How to Report a UFO Sighting (and Where the Reports Actually Go)

You can file a report right here. The Alien Tavern sighting report form takes the date, place, shape, duration, what you saw and up to three photos, with or without an account. A person reviews every report before it is published; approved reports appear on the reports page without your name or email, count in the state-by-state statistics, and are released as open data under CC BY 4.0 so researchers can use them. NUFORC and MUFON, below, are the long-running U.S. centers, and filing with more than one is fine.

A report is only as useful as its details, and the details fade fast. While it is fresh, write down the date and the exact time it started and ended; where you were, as precisely as a street address or coordinates; the direction you were looking, using a compass app or a landmark; how high the object was above the horizon, in fists held at arm's length if you have no better measure; its apparent size compared with the Moon or a fingernail at arm's length; color, shape, lights, sound, and how it moved; the weather; and whether anyone else saw it. If you filmed it, keep the original file with its metadata and do not re-encode or crop it.

Investigators ask for these things because they are what let a sighting be checked against flight tracks, satellite passes, and the positions of planets. A vivid description without a time and a bearing cannot be checked at all.

Most sightings are explained by a handful of things, and you can check them yourself in a few minutes. Starlink satellite trains, a line of moving lights, are the most common new report since 2019; sites such as FindStarlink and Heavens-Above show when a train or the International Space Station will pass over your location. Bright planets low on the horizon, Venus above all, account for a large share of "hovering light" reports; a planetarium app such as Stellarium shows what was where. Aircraft and helicopters can be matched on Flightradar24 or ADS-B Exchange, which show tracks by time. Rocket launches produce spirals and glowing plumes visible for hundreds of miles; launch schedules are public. Drones, balloons, Chinese lanterns, and out-of-focus birds or insects explain most of the rest.

None of this means your sighting was one of them. It means that if it survives these checks, your report is worth far more, and you can say so in it.

There is no government office that takes UFO reports from the public. The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) accepts reports only from current and former U.S. government employees and contractors with knowledge of official programs, and NASA, despite its 2023 UAP study, has no public reporting channel. The Federal Aviation Administration's Aeronautical Information Manual (section 7-7-4) used to send reporters to a civilian collection center; its current text directs anyone wanting to report UAP to AARO's website, and to local law enforcement if life or property seems endangered. Since AARO does not yet take reports from the public, that guidance loops back to the civilian centers below.

The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), run since 1994 by Peter Davenport, takes reports through an online form and publishes them, lightly edited, in a searchable public database going back decades; it also runs a hotline for sightings within the past week. The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) takes reports through its Case Management System and assigns cases to trained volunteer field investigators, who may contact you; it is the only U.S. organization that investigates individual reports at scale, and membership is optional. A newer option is the Enigma Labs app, a private company that collects sightings with location and time, scores them, and shows nearby reports. Reporting to more than one is fine; NUFORC and MUFON do not share databases.

In the United Kingdom, the Ministry of Defence closed its UFO desk in 2009 and no longer accepts or investigates reports; the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) takes them, and the police are the right call only for a safety concern. France is the exception among governments: GEIPAN, a unit of the space agency CNES, accepts reports through its website, investigates them, and publishes its case files with a classification from A (explained) to D (unexplained after investigation). In Canada there is no official body; Ufology Research in Manitoba has compiled the annual Canadian UFO Survey since 1989, and MUFON has Canadian chapters. Most other countries rely on national volunteer groups, many of them affiliated with MUFON.

At NUFORC, reports are read, sometimes annotated by staff ("possible Starlink"), and published to the database within days; it is a record, not an investigation. At MUFON, a case is opened and an investigator may interview you, request your original media, and file a disposition: identified, unknown, insufficient data, or hoax. GEIPAN follows a similar process with gendarmerie support and publishes anonymized files. None of these bodies can tell you what you saw with certainty; what they can do is put your sighting next to others from the same night and place, which is how patterns such as the 2024 drone wave and the modern orb reports are recognized.

Two things to keep in mind. Reports are public: NUFORC publishes the text, and MUFON case summaries appear on its site, so leave out anything you would not want online. And do not embellish or, worse, fabricate: hoaxes are usually caught, they waste volunteers' time, and the hoaxed cases are the ones that get remembered.

Whether you are following up your own sighting or reading into the subject, these are the sources this site relies on. NUFORC's database (nuforc.org) is the largest public collection of raw sighting reports, searchable by state, shape, and date. MUFON (mufon.com) publishes case summaries and its investigators' findings. The U.S. National Archives holds the complete Project Blue Book files, digitized in its online catalog, and The Black Vault (theblackvault.com) hosts hundreds of thousands of pages of UFO-related government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. AARO (aaro.mil) publishes the Pentagon's annual UAP reports, its historical review, and resolved case videos. The Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), founded by J. Allen Hynek, maintains the archive of his work and the classic case files.

Outside the U.S., GEIPAN (cnes-geipan.fr) is the only government body that publishes its investigations, and BUFORA (bufora.org.uk) covers the UK. For the scientific search rather than sightings, the SETI Institute (seti.org) and Breakthrough Listen (breakthroughinitiatives.org) publish their methods and results, and NASA's 2023 UAP Independent Study report is the agency's considered position. For the other side of every case, Metabunk (metabunk.org), Mick West's forum, is where the famous videos get taken apart, and the Skeptical Inquirer (skepticalinquirer.org) has covered the field since 1976. Reading the believers and the skeptics on the same case is the fastest education there is.