UFO & UAP Files Statistics in US 2026 | Key Facts

Release of UFO & UAP Files by the US Govt 2026

On February 19, 2026, the United States government formally moved to initiate one of the most significant transparency actions in the history of federal record-keeping around aerial and unexplained phenomena. President Donald Trump directed the Secretary of Defense and all relevant federal departments and agencies to begin the process of identifying and releasing government files related to Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), and information connected to extraterrestrial and alien life — as reported and confirmed by NBC News, CBS News, CNN, and NPR. The directive places the full authority of the executive branch behind a disclosure process that, until this point, had been driven primarily by statutory obligation under federal law. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly acknowledged the directive, signalling Pentagon compliance. Members of Congress from both parties responded with immediate support, with the bipartisan House UAP Task Force calling for dedicated hearings and senior Senate figures describing the potential release as a matter of significant public interest. The announcement marks a decisive political acceleration of a process that the U.S. government’s own legislative framework had already set in motion — and positions 2026 as a pivotal year in the decades-long effort to place official UFO and UAP records into the public domain.

The institutional groundwork enabling this directive has been years in the making. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 118-31), under Sections 1841–1843, had already established a statutory mandate requiring every relevant federal agency — including the Department of Defense (DoD), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) — to identify, organise, and digitally transfer all UAP-related records in their custody to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) under the newly created UAP Records Collection (Record Group 615), with a legally binding deadline of September 30, 2025. By August 2025, the first wave of agency transfers from ODNI, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the FAA, and the NRC had already been completed, with NARA publishing records through the National Archives Catalog on a rolling basis. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — the Department of Defense body responsible for receiving, investigating, and resolving UAP reports across all military and federal domains — had, by October 2024, accumulated a cumulative database of 1,652 UAP reports since its establishment in July 2022, publishing the most comprehensive unclassified accounting of U.S. government UAP data ever made available in its FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report. As of February 20, 2026, the full scope and timeline of the file release remain under agency review. What is not in question is that the legal architecture, the institutional infrastructure, and now the explicit political direction of the executive branch are, for the first time in the 79-year history of formal U.S. government UAP investigation, all pointing in the same direction.

Key UFO & UAP Interesting Facts in the US 2026

Before breaking down the category-by-category statistics, the table below presents the most important verified headline facts about UFO and UAP files in the US — drawn exclusively from official U.S. government sources and confirmed news reporting as of February 20, 2026.

Source: AARO FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP (November 14, 2024), DoD/ODNI; NARA Record Group 615, archives.gov/research/topics/uaps/rg-615; USAF Project Blue Book Fact Sheet, archives.gov/research/military/air-force/ufos; af.mil Fact Sheet; Trump Truth Social post February 19, 2026, reported by NBC News, CBS News, CNN, NPR, Al Jazeera.

Taken together, these facts reveal not a story of one dramatic government moment but the slow, structural normalisation of UAP transparency as a matter of law and policy. The 21 truly anomalous cases out of 1,652 total reports represent less than 2% of everything AARO has ever investigated — but they are also the cases that even AARO’s own director, a former NSA physicist, openly admits he cannot explain. The 701 unresolved cases from Project Blue Book, sitting in the National Archives for nearly 57 years, represent a baseline of documented official uncertainty that has never been erased. And the 18 UAP sightings near nuclear facilities — including 6 consecutive nights at a Virginia fuel cycle facility — are the kind of pattern that, involving a known adversary, would trigger an immediate classified response from multiple agencies. Trump’s directive does not resolve any of these mysteries. What it does — combined with the existing 2024 NDAA transfer mandates — is formally acknowledge that the public has a right to see what the U.S. government has collected and puts the full authority of the presidency behind making that happen.

AARO UAP Report Totals & Case Breakdown in the US 2026

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was formally stood up in July 2022, succeeding the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) that operated under the Office of Naval Intelligence from 2020–2021. AARO serves as the central U.S. government hub for all UAP reporting across the military and federal agencies. Its FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report, released publicly on November 14, 2024, is the most comprehensive unclassified accounting of U.S. government UAP case data ever published.

Source: FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Department of Defense / Office of the Director of National Intelligence, released November 14, 2024. Available at aaro.mil and dni.gov.

Reading these numbers carefully tells a layered and important story. Of the 757 new reports received in the FY2024 cycle, AARO was only able to fully resolve 49 during the same reporting period — an in-period resolution rate of just 6.5%. When the 243 cases pending peer review are included (all expected to resolve to conventional objects like balloons, drones, birds, or satellites), the effective resolution rate rises to approximately 38.5% of new intake. That leaves a substantial 61.5% of FY2024 reports either insufficiently documented to analyse (444 cases archived) or remaining genuinely unresolved at the time the report was published. The 21 cases flagged as “truly anomalous” are the ones receiving the most serious attention from AARO’s intelligence community and science and technology partners. AARO Director Jon Kosloski — a former NSA physicist with over two decades of experience in advanced optics, computing, and crypto-mathematics — told reporters at a November 2024 briefing that there are cases he, “with my physics and engineering background and time in the intelligence community, I do not understand, and I don’t know anybody else who understands them.” He also confirmed that at least one of the 21 anomalous cases “has been happening for an extended period of time” — a statement that implies repeated, documented contact with an unidentified object, not a one-time sensor glitch. The 18 UAP sightings near nuclear infrastructure, including two incidents with flight durations of 53 minutes and 1 hour and 57 minutes respectively, are a separate and growing national security concern that AARO explicitly notes in its unclassified report.

UAP Resolved Case Breakdown by Object Type in the US 2026

When AARO does successfully identify and close a UAP case, the resolutions cluster into a consistent and revealing pattern. The breakdown below, drawn from the FY2024 annual report, shows what 70% of resolved cases actually were — and why even the “prosaic” resolutions tell us something important about how difficult accurate UAP identification is in real-world sensing conditions.

Source: AARO FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report, DoD/ODNI, November 14, 2024; NewsNation and DefenseScoop coverage of AARO Director briefing, November 14–20, 2024.

The 70% balloon figure in resolved UAP cases is frequently misread as evidence that the entire UAP phenomenon is trivial or easily explained. The reality is more complex. AARO’s own reporting notes that the balloon category includes large research and commercial balloon systems that operate at altitudes overlapping with military flight corridors and can generate radar and sensor returns that are entirely consistent with anomalous aerial phenomena to a trained observer. The 16% UAS/drone resolution rate has taken on new urgency in the context of documented drone incursions over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia in 2023–2024 — incidents that triggered their own Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in November 2024. The 4% Starlink satellite figure is a specifically flagged and growing trend: AARO’s FY2024 report cites a commercial pilot who reported “white flashing lights” in the night sky that were ultimately attributed to a Starlink satellite launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, occurring one hour before the sighting on the same orbital path. As the Starlink and other mega-constellations expand, AARO projects that this category of misidentification will continue rising. The 8% bird resolution rate reflects a genuine technical challenge — electro-optical and infrared sensors render birds as amorphous orb-shaped blobs due to compression and pixilation, and flapping wings appear as “flickering objects” in full-motion video, a signature that AARO’s analysts now specifically train to recognise.

UAP Reported Morphology (Shapes) Statistics in the US 2026

One of the most consistent and striking patterns across all years of AARO’s data — and across the broader 79-year history of U.S. government UFO investigation — is the distribution of reported object shapes. AARO’s morphology statistics, published on aaro.mil and updated through November 15, 2025, represent descriptions provided by military personnel, FAA-reporting commercial pilots, and other authorised observers at the moment of the sighting.

Source: AARO UAP Reporting Trends, aaro.mil/UAP-Cases/UAP-Reporting-Trends/ — data range January 1, 1996 through November 15, 2025; AARO FY2024 Annual Report morphology section; EarthSky / NASA AARO public briefing data, August 2023.

The 47% dominance of the orb/round/sphere shape is the single most consistent statistical signature in all of AARO’s published data, and it holds across multiple years and multiple reporting sources — military, commercial aviation, and civilian. This is not a one-year anomaly. AARO itself highlighted it as the “typical” characteristic shape in its public briefings, including a slide presented at the NASA Public Meeting in May 2023. The pattern aligns closely with accounts from military pilots over many years — including descriptions of “metallic spheres” by U.S. Navy F/A-18 pilots and Reaper drone operators, and of “cubes inside spheres” that reportedly passed in close proximity to fighter jets in restricted airspace. AARO Director Kosloski confirmed in November 2024 that even the 21 genuinely anomalous FY2024 cases align with these same dominant reported shapes — orbs, triangles, and cylinders. The 22% of reports lacking any distinct morphology data is itself a critical finding: it reflects the operational reality that the vast majority of UAP encounters are brief, occur under sensor-degraded conditions, and do not yield the clean multi-modal observational data needed for reliable shape characterisation. The documented existence of descriptions like “jellyfish-like shapes with multicoloured flashing lights” and objects matching none of the standard morphological categories underscores why AARO uses the Active Archive system to preserve reports that current tools cannot adequately analyse — in anticipation of future sensor capability improvements.

Historical US Government UFO Investigation Timeline & Statistics in the US 2026

Trump’s February 2026 directive did not emerge in a vacuum. The U.S. government has been formally investigating unidentified aerial objects since at least 1947 — a 79-year institutional history that spans Cold War intelligence operations, scientific review panels, bureaucratic terminations, quiet revivals, and now the most ambitious transparency push the subject has ever seen.

Source: AARO Historical Record Report Volume 1 (March 8, 2024, defense.gov); USAF Project Blue Book Fact Sheet (af.mil; archives.gov); National Archives NARA Record Group 615 (archives.gov/research/topics/uaps/rg-615); NBC News, CBS News, CNN, NPR, Al Jazeera, February 19–20, 2026.

The historical table above makes one thing unmistakably clear: the U.S. government has never truly stopped investigating this subject. When Project Blue Book was terminated on December 17, 1969 — after recording 12,618 UFO sightings over 22 years, with 701 remaining permanently unresolved — the official position was that the phenomenon presented no national security threat and warranted no further government study. But Project BLUE BOOK’s closure was not the end. The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was running quietly from 2007 to 2012 under DIA funding. The UAP Task Force launched in 2020. AARO followed in 2022. Each successive program has expanded the reporting scope, reduced the stigma of official reporting, and increased the institutional seriousness with which the subject is treated. The AARO Historical Record Report, published in March 2024, found approximately 24 separate U.S. government investigatory programs touching on UFOs and UAP between 1945 and 2024 — a figure that itself reveals how much sustained institutional attention was devoted to this subject even during periods when publicly the government claimed the issue was closed. Trump’s February 2026 order is the latest — and potentially most consequential — chapter in a story that has never stopped being written.

Congress & Legislative Action on UAP Files in the US 2026

Behind every AARO report, every NARA records transfer, and every public hearing is a legislative framework that has driven this process forward. Without sustained congressional pressure — much of it genuinely bipartisan — the institutional gravity within the defense and intelligence community would have kept these files classified indefinitely.

Source: FY2022, FY2023, FY2024 National Defense Authorization Acts (congress.gov); AARO FY2024 Annual Report (aaro.mil); NBC News, NPR, CBS News, February 19–20, 2026.

The legislative record shows that UAP transparency has evolved into a rare genuinely bipartisan issue in the U.S. Congress. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who chairs the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee with AARO oversight, drove much of the reporting mandate legislation. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) runs the House UAP Task Force and was among the first to publicly cheer Trump’s February 2026 directive. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) called it “a bipartisan thing” within hours of the announcement. The 2024 NDAA UAP Records Act — which created NARA’s Record Group 615 and set the September 30, 2025 agency transfer deadline — passed with bipartisan support as part of the broader defense authorisation. The first wave of records from ODNI, OSD, FAA, and NRC was publicly released by NARA in April 2025, months ahead of deadline, reflecting genuine institutional compliance with the law. What Trump’s February 2026 directive adds to this existing framework is presidential authority — the ability to potentially compel the release of classified materials that agencies are currently permitted to withhold under Section 1843 of the 2024 NDAA, which allows postponement of disclosure for national security reasons subject to congressional notification. Whether the directive will unlock that restricted tier of records — or simply accelerate the release of materials already headed for public disclosure under existing law — is the central unresolved question as of February 20, 2026.

UAP Reports Near Critical Infrastructure & Military Sites in the US 2026

One of the most underreported dimensions of the U.S. government’s UAP data is the documented pattern of sightings near military installations and civilian nuclear infrastructure. The FY2024 AARO annual report included specific, granular data on these incidents that carries clear national security implications — regardless of whether the objects in question are foreign adversary drones, domestic unmanned systems, or something else entirely unidentified.

Source: FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Department of Defense / ODNI (November 14, 2024, media.defense.gov and aaro.mil); NewSpaceEconomy analysis of FY2024 AARO Report, November 2024.

The data on UAP activity near nuclear infrastructure carries a weight that no amount of bureaucratic hedging fully obscures. Six consecutive nights of UAP sightings at a Virginia fuel cycle facility — documented in an unclassified Pentagon report — is the kind of pattern that, if attributable to a known adversary platform, would trigger an immediate and highly classified multi-agency response. The fact that it appears in an unclassified annual report means AARO could not attribute it to any known aircraft, drone operator, or foreign actor. The 3 documented reports of UAP trailing or shadowing U.S. military pilots in FY2024 are similarly significant: these are not civilian misidentifications of weather balloons. These are trained military aviators formally reporting that an unidentified object matched and actively tracked the movements of their aircraft — behaviour that, from a foreign adversary, would represent a serious intelligence failure and immediate escalation trigger. Jon Kosloski confirmed at the November 2024 Pentagon briefing that AARO passes all resolved drone and balloon cases to other agencies for security follow-up, while the office itself focuses exclusively on “the truly anomalous where we don’t understand the activity.” The 21 truly anomalous FY2024 cases — combined with the nuclear infrastructure incidents, the pilot-shadowing reports, and Trump’s unprecedented February 19, 2026 release directive — represent the full scope of why this subject now commands the most serious and sustained attention from the U.S. government it has received since the height of Project Blue Book in the 1960s. The files are moving. The question is what they will say.

Disclaimer: This research report is compiled from publicly available sources. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is given as to the completeness or reliability of the information. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions, losses, or damages of any kind arising from the use of this report.

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