The Centralized UAP Data Situation
The elevator summary — it’s all sketchy:
- Blue Book: It’s well known today that the best cases were filtered and forwarded to CIA for real investigations by intelligence professionals. They also explicitly dropped many categories of events.
For example, see this 1989 FBI vault doc.: “Original members of the Project Blue Book found that many reports never were received by this group, but went to intelligence-gathering agencies.”
2. NICAP: Keyhoe was pushed out under protest in 1969 and it was taken over by an ex-CIA/USAF Col. Joseph Bryan III. There was also much speculation that NICAP was full of intel moles. See the book “Wayward Sons: NICAP and the IC” by Jack Brewer.
Also, strangely, many 1947 reports NICAP had in their records are not in the public NICAP data I can find. In the book Investigating UFO’s by Kettelkamp page 48: it says NICAP catalogued 850 sightings just for the summer of 1947. So how many NICAP sighting records have I found for the entirety of 1947 on the web? Only 101 — something is wrong.
3. MUFON: See “Skinwalkers at the Pentagon” by Colm Kelleher. The best cases go out the back door, and it’s unclear if they are ever recorded. Their database is not publicly accessible. updb has reported that in the events they’ve been able to scrape, the locations are now encoded or encrypted in some way. (If their database can’t be publicly monitored, how can you verify that your report isn’t “lost”?)
Also see this (or this backup URL): “There was much talk of issues ranging from discrepancies with chain of command to disappearing case files. To know people in MUFON circles was to know the organization was strongly suspected of being an intelligence asset.”
In Feb. 2024 the MUFON CMS was reportedly “hacked” (backup here), resulting in an unknown amount of lost data.
4. APRO: Sadly and strangely, con artists got their records. Even if this data is recovered, it’s unknown how many records were lost or corrupted.
5. NUFORC: Many events were not even logged textually and are only available on audio tapes. Why? This is strange. (What percentage of cases were just lost forever?) Their event data was not recorded in a consistent format over the years, so it was a nightmare to normalize and geocode it. How reliable is this data? Were there consistent or any callbacks on events reported on the web or by email? Additionally, while browsing this database, there are many events with the note “NUFORC Note: Date is approximate.” If something as simple as the event date is approximate, how accurate are these events?
From the ufo-reports repo on github: “The NUFORC data is considered by some to be obfuscated on purpose, regardless it is some of the most badly formatted data I personally have ever seen. Two prior conversion attempts lead to increasing frustration and major data chaos.”
6. UFOCAT: The oldest non-classified digital database: “There are too many gaps in the data”. It’s unclear how many records got lost in the shuffle over the decades.
Physicist Dr. Willy Smith ripped apart UFOCAT here (page 13). He reported that the database was basically encoded (like Hatch’s, which I recently decoded), so each record could be printed out on single lines. This terse encoding made it difficult to understand and use by researchers. He also reported blatant inaccuracies, and single events (even major ones) appearing in the database numerous times, among other problems.
These databases are unbalanced, i.e. with too much focus on the US.
So what does all this mean? Any databases built off this data are somewhat to very sketchy IMO, such as the “CAPELLA AAWSAP data warehouse”: https://ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com/2023/09/what-advanced-aerospace-weapon-system.html
The “203,805” cases statistic for UFOCAT is unlikely to be accurate, assuming Dr. Smith’s observations about repeated records for events still holds. The total # of unique cases may be substantially lower.
You’re probably fooling yourself if 90–95% of the data you’ve got are from these datasets. After studying this situation for a year, I’m convinced that decentralized international event gathering is the way to go. The centralized (corporate/gov) sources are questionable at best, at least in the US.
