{"it":{"id":"GOV-NARA","sub":"Records collection","name":"UAP Records Collection (Record Group 615)","place":"U.S. National Archives (NARA), College Park, Maryland, USA","lat":39.0,"lon":-76.96,"date":"Created under the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act; records added on a rolling basis","rep":"Created under sections 1841–1843 of Public Law 118-31.","off":"NARA posts records in its catalog as agencies transfer them.","src":[{"t":"National Archives: Records related to UFOs and UAPs","u":"https://www.archives.gov/research/topics/uaps"},{"t":"National Archives: Record Group 615 – UAP Records Collection","u":"https://www.archives.gov/research/topics/uaps/rg-615"},{"t":"National Archives: Project BLUE BOOK – Unidentified Flying Objects","u":"https://www.archives.gov/research/military/air-force/ufos"}],"tags":["Archive","Law","USA"],"kind":"gov","sum":"Every US federal agency is now required to find its records on unidentified anomalous phenomena and hand copies to the National Archives.\n\nThe National Archives set up the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection, Record Group 615, under sections 1841 to 1843 of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, Public Law 118-31. Agencies must transfer digital copies of all their UAP records, and the collection grows on a rolling basis as transfers arrive. Its listed contributors include the FAA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the ODNI, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Agency, the State Department, the FBI, the Department of the Air Force and Customs and Border Protection. It sits beside the older Project Blue Book files, held on 94 rolls of microfilm.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is what is not there. Each agency decides what counts as a UAP record, and an outside reader has no list of what exists to check the transfers against.\n\nThe official view is that the law brings these records into public view in one place. The doubt is that a collection built from what agencies choose to send cannot show what they kept back.\n\nHow would anyone know what is missing from Record Group 615?","qs":["Agencies decide what counts as a UAP record. How would anyone know what is missing?","Which agency's files would you most want to read, and why?","Does a public archive build trust, or only shift the question to what was left out?"],"yt":"Check RG 615 in the catalog and note which agencies have transferred files so far.","rel":["REC-PURSUE","GOV-PBB"],"hook":"Record Group 615 now collects every US agency's UFO records, under Public Law 118-31.","why":"US law now makes every agency send its UFO records to one archive. Each agency decides what to send."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"GOV-NARA","sum":"Picture two archives side by side. The first is a cabinet of microfilm: 94 rolls of 35mm film, numbered T-1206, threaded one at a time through a reader in a quiet room. They hold the United States Air Force's Project Blue Book, more than two decades of investigated sightings, and the first roll carries a list of everything on the others. The second archive has no rolls and no cabinet. It exists as a list of links on a web page, one per government agency, and it grows whenever an agency decides to send something. Its name is Record Group 615, and it may be the most unusual collection the National Archives has ever been ordered to build.\n\nThe order came from Congress. Sections 1841 to 1843 of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, Public Law 118-31, required the National Archives and Records Administration to create an \"Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection.\" The same law required every federal agency to review the records in its custody, identify each one relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena, the official term for what most people still call UFOs, and organize them for disclosure to the public and transfer to the Archives. The Archives duly created Record Group 615 and began receiving material on what it calls an ongoing, rolling basis. Whatever arrives is posted in the online National Archives Catalog, and until it is online it can be read on public computers at the research complex in College Park, Maryland.\n\nThe wording of the law is where an ordinary reader should slow down. The collection, as the Archives quotes it, is to hold \"copies of all Government, Government-provided, or Government-funded records relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence (or equivalent subjects by any other name with the specific and sole exclusion of temporarily non-attributed objects).\" A statute of the United States, passed as part of a defense budget, names \"technologies of unknown origin\" and \"non-human intelligence\" as categories of government record. It does not say such things exist. It does say that if records about them exist, in any format and under any name, they belong in this collection. The clause about \"any other name\" is the language of people who expected that someone might try to avoid a definition by changing a label.\n\nThe rules for transfer are equally careful. Agencies must find all qualifying records in any format, make digital copies, and send only those; the Archives will not accept paper. Each record must carry metadata according to written guidance. Where a releasable record has been redacted, the agency must send both versions at once, the redacted copy and the unredacted original. The Archives asked agencies with publicly releasable material to begin transfers before 30 September 2025.\n\nAt the time of writing, nine contributors are listed: the Federal Aviation Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Agency, the Department of State, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of the Air Force, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Each entry leads to a series in the catalog, described with what the page calls \"Agency Provided Metadata.\" That phrase matters. The description of what each agency sent comes from the agency itself.\n\nThe older archive next door shows how the government closed the question last time. Blue Book's papers came to the Archives when the Air Force retired them. They are declassified, with the names of people involved in sightings removed: about 37 cubic feet of case files arranged by date, plus project and investigation files, at roughly 2,000 pages to the cubic foot. An Air Force fact sheet from January 1985, reproduced on the Archives' own page, gives the totals. From 1947 to 1969, 12,618 sightings were reported to Blue Book, and 701 remained \"unidentified.\" The Air Force's conclusions were firm: no sighting ever indicated a threat to national security, there was no evidence that unidentified sightings represented technology beyond present-day science, and none that they were extraterrestrial vehicles. The fact sheet even addresses a rumor head-on. There are not now, it says, \"nor ever have been, any extraterrestrial visitors or equipment on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.\"\n\nThe Archives has also done its own detective work, and it is worth noticing how thoroughly. Asked repeatedly about \"Majestic 12,\" an alleged secret project, its staff searched Air Force, Joint Chiefs and National Security Council records. They found only a single one-page memo dated 14 July 1954, and they found problems with it: no Top Secret register number, a security marking not used until the Nixon administration, no matching meeting record, and its supposed author overseas on the day he would have written it. On Roswell, the Archives says it found no documentation in the Blue Book records at all, and it summarizes the Air Force's 1994 conclusion that the debris was consistent with a balloon device from a then-classified project. These are serious archivists, and their mainstream view is clear. Record Group 615 is a law being carried out in good faith, bringing scattered material into one public place.\n\nThat is the fair reading. The law gives the public something it never had before: a single address where every agency must deposit what it holds.\n\nBut a collection built this way has a shape worth thinking about, and it is a shape set by power, a matter of who controls the gate. Each agency decides which of its records count as UAP records. Each describes its own transfers. No outside list exists of what every agency holds, so no reader can check the deposits against the vaults. The law demands unredacted copies alongside redacted ones, yet what the public sees is the releasable version. Blue Book's 701 unidentified cases sit in one room; the agencies that might hold the rest of the story decide for themselves what to put in the other.\n\nAnd the categories themselves remain on the books. A government that for decades said the question was closed has now written \"non-human intelligence\" into federal law, and asked its own agencies to look in their files for it.\n\nBack in that quiet reading room, the last two rolls of Blue Book film hold only photographs, filmed separately because they had been scattered among the papers, every case behind them investigated and closed. Online, a list of nine agencies waits on a web page, and the space below the last entry is still blank."},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/GOV-NARA-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"UAP Records Collection (Record Group 615), U.S. National Archives (NARA), College Park, Maryland, USA — Photograph of the United States National Archives Building, Washington D.C.","by":"David Samuel, User:Hellodavey1902","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","lu":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_National_Archives_Building.jpg","g":false,"ct":false,"cap":"","sec":[{"src":"img/t/GOV-NARA.webp","by":"U.S. Government National Archives and Records Administration","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seal_of_the_United_States_National_Archives_and_Records_Administration.svg","cap":"Seal of the United States National Archives and Records Administration.svg"}]},"hh":[{"v":"§1841–1843","h":"Sections of Public Law 118-31 requiring agencies to transfer UAP records","s":[346]}],"hs":{"346":["National Archives: Records related to UFOs and UAPs","https://www.archives.gov/research/topics/uaps"]}}