Archive / names
The people, organisations, programmes and places that keep turning up. Each page gathers every case that mentions them.
People35
A sceptic.
A sceptic, and the founder of the Metabunk forum.
An astronomer, and for years the Air Force's own scientific consultant.
Edward J.
A folklorist and senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, Dr David Clarke advised The National Archives on the Ministry of Defence UFO files released from 2008 to 2013.
Brian Dunning, host of Skeptoid, turns up again and again in these archives, usually once the witnesses have spoken.
Harvard astronomer Donald H.
A researcher and author whose name runs through cases on three continents.
A journalist whose name keeps surfacing at the turning points of the field.
A sceptic of the UFO field, and a Skeptical Inquirer columnist.
An optical physicist with the US Navy.
A University of Arizona atmospheric physicist, James E.
An author, and a believer in UFOs.
James Fox is a filmmaker whose work keeps returning to the field's hardest cases.
A sceptical investigator, often writing in Skeptical Inquirer, whose name turns up again and again in the debate that follows the famous cases.
An Australian researcher who kept returning to the country's strangest cases, and often to their ordinary explanations.
A researcher, and a former Army helicopter pilot.
From 1991 to 1994, Nick Pope ran the Ministry of Defence's small UFO desk.
A BUFORA investigator who kept offering down-to-earth answers.
Project Blue Book's man at the top in the mid 1960s.
A writer and researcher who returns again and again as a sceptical voice, most often working alongside David Clarke.
Jerome Clark was a researcher and the author of The UFO Encyclopedia.
June 24, 1947.
An astronomer, and one of the Condon Committee's most careful investigators.
A US astronomer and retired USAF major, James McGaha brought the sceptic's case to several famous sightings.
A space analyst and sceptic, James Oberg turns up in the debate after several famous cases.
A former director of AARO, Sean Kirkpatrick offered sceptical readings of several cases in the archive.
A patient investigator of close encounters.
A former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Christopher Mellon played a quiet part in bringing the Navy videos to light.
A Navy commander and the lead pilot in the USS Nimitz "Tic Tac" Encounter of 2004.
He says he worked a handful of days at a hidden site called S-4.
A former intelligence officer turned whistleblower.
Maj.
Luis Elizondo, an ex-Pentagon intelligence officer, was named in 2017 as the head of AATIP.
A physicist, drawn into one of the field's most contested paper trails.
Organisations14
The Mutual UFO Network sent its investigators into some of the field's best known cases.
A civilian group, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena looked into sightings the Air Force had brushed aside.
Kew is home to the files.
Britain's Ministry of Defence kept a small desk for UFO reports for more than 50 years.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command watches the continent's skies, and its name runs through several cases in the archive.
Canada's Royal Canadian Mounted Police turn up again and again in the country's strangest cases.
Skeptical Inquirer is where the doubters made their case.
The Central Intelligence Agency comes up again and again in these cases.
A skeptic forum.
A civilian research group with investigators in the field.
The Pentagon's UAP office.
J.
France's official UFO office sits inside the space agency CNES.
Strategic Air Command ran America's nuclear bombers and missiles, and several of the archive's most unsettling base incidents took place under its watch.
Programmes and projects8
The US Air Force's long-running inquiry into unidentified flying objects grew out of Project Sign and Grudge.
October 1966.
A television series that kept returning to the strangest nights in the archive.
Project Sign was the Air Force programme that gathered flying saucer reports in 1948.
Brian Dunning's Skeptoid often gives the sceptical reading in this archive.
A History series that went looking for answers.
January 1953.
A Pentagon program with two names, AAWSAP and AATIP.
Places4
A town in New Mexico whose name became shorthand for the whole field.
A stretch of Suffolk woodland between two twin bases, RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters.
An Air Force base in Ohio, called Wright Field in the earliest records.
Area 51 sits in the Nevada desert on Groom Lake.
Craft and objects1
A white shape over the Pacific in 2004.
Terms3
The planet Venus was the explanation sceptics offered again and again.
Close encounters are the field's term for sightings up close, where a witness meets something at short range.
Missing time is a term of the field for a gap in a witness's memory after an encounter.