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Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

Office of the Director of National Intelligence · 2021-06-25 · 9 pages · text from the file's own layer

This preliminary assessment was issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on 25 June 2021 and prepared for the congressional intelligence and armed services committees. It reviews 144 US government reports of unidentified aerial phenomena from 2004 to 2021. Only one of them, a deflating balloon, was identified with high confidence. The report proposes five explanatory categories, says UAP pose a flight safety issue and possibly a national security challenge, and recommends standardized reporting, expanded collection and more investment.

  • p. 5 UNCLASSIFIED 5 UNCLASSIFIED But Some Potential Patterns Do Emerge Although there was wide variability in the…
  • p. 6 …category pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them. The UAPTF intends to focus…
  • p. 7 …and mitigate the collection bias in the dataset. One proposal is to use advanced algorithms to…
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APPENDIX A - Definition of Key Terms
This report and UAPTF databases use the following defining terms:
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP): Airborne objects not immediately identifiable. The
acronym UAP represents the broadest category of airborne objects reviewed for analysis.
UAP Event: A holistic description of an occurrence during which a pilot or aircrew witnessed
(or detected) a UAP.
UAP Incident: A specific part of the event.
UAP Report: Documentation of a UAP event, to include verified chains of custody and basic
information such as the time, date, location, and description of the UAP. UAP reports include
Range Fouler1 reports and other reporting.
1 U.S. Navy aviators define a “range fouler” as an activity or object that interrupts pre-planned training or other
military activity in a military operating area or restricted airspace.

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