An open, source-attributed atlas of UFO and UAP cases — aggregated from NUFORC, MUFON, GEIPAN, AARO, and 23 national archives. Each case is geocoded, categorized, and rated for credibility against published evidence.
Cases, researcher deaths, and disclosure milestones on a shared 1942–2026 axis. Hover for details, click for full record.
Twenty-two years of US Air Force investigation. 12,618 sightings. 701 the Air Force itself could not explain.
The Air Force's own statistics, made public in the 14 January 1977 UFO Fact Sheet, are now part of the National Archives. They are the most-cited government dataset in the entire field — and the most consistently misread.
The 1952 wave is the single largest anomaly in the record. 1,501 reported sightings, 303 of them unidentified. One in five remained unexplained — more than triple the program's twenty-two-year average. This is the year of the Washington D.C. radar incidents over the White House, the year that forced the Air Force to hold its first public press conference on the topic, and the year that produced the most dense single-year cluster of credible cases anywhere on this site.
The 5.6% unsolved rate across all 12,618 cases is the figure that matters. The Air Force investigated, in its own words, with its own personnel, using its own methodology — and after 22 years of work concluded that 701 cases could not be explained. That is the official record. Not a fringe count, not an enthusiast estimate, but the United States Air Force's own classification of its own data.
All cases plotted at their reported coordinates. Equal Earth projection.
Sorted by credibility, then by date. Click a row to see details.
| Rating | Year | Case | Category | Country |
|---|
How each case is rated against published evidence.
Multi-witness (3+) or official military, police, or pilot witness, supported by physical evidence, instrumental data (radar, FLIR), or formal government documentation.
Single-witness, hypnosis-recovered memory, confirmed hoax, or claims with no independently verifiable evidence. Includes cases adequately explained by conventional means.
A binary rating is intentional: it forces a clear judgment call rather than hiding uncertainty in a 1–10 scale. Edge cases (e.g. credible whistleblower without verifiable evidence) are documented in each case's individual page.
All cases trace to one or more of the following archives.