ODNI Preliminary Assessment on UAP
LOOK CLOSER
The visual record
Illustrations, recordings and archival references — each with its own provenance. A documented source is a starting point for investigation, not a verdict on its explanation.
ODNI Preliminary Assessment, June 2021
Cover of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's nine-page 'Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena', 25 June 2021, which reviewed 144 reports and explained one. Official document.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence · 2021 ↗Public domain — US government workLicence terms ↗On 25 June 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a nine-page preliminary assessment of 144 UAP reports from 2004 to 2021; it identified one as a deflating balloon, said 18 showed unusual movement, and found no evidence of a foreign or non-human origin while excluding neither. The corpus does not discuss the document directly.
Read the full account
What was released. Mandated by the Intelligence Authorization Act for 2021, the unclassified assessment summarized reports collected mainly from Navy aviators since 2019. It sorted possible explanations into airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, US developmental programs, foreign adversary systems and an "other" bin, and said 18 reports appeared to show unusual flight characteristics that might be sensor error, spoofing or observer misperception. (FACT.)
What followed. Congress created the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group in November 2021, replaced by AARO in July 2022; annual unclassified UAP reports followed, with the number of reports rising above 800 by 2023. (FACT.)
Explanations offered. Skeptics read the report as confirming that the data are too poor to draw conclusions; supporters note that it did not attribute the objects to US technology and left open every category. (INFERENCE.)
The event
| Date | |
|---|---|
| Place | 38.9539, -77.1476 exact · United States |
| Official response | The ODNI report said the limited data left most UAP unexplained, that UAP posed a flight-safety and possible national-security problem, and that 143 of 144 reports could not be identified. |
Reported by
- office of the director of national intelligence government report author, with the UAP Task Force
Investigated by
- uap task force government
On the map
ODNI Preliminary Assessment on UAP, Pentagon formally releases FLIR1, GIMBAL and GOFAST, House Intelligence subcommittee UAP hearing (17 May 2022), House Oversight UAP hearing (26 July 2023), AARO established. Open the full map filtered to this record.