The record, honestly
This is a corpus of 197 documented UFO/UAP cases, each with a deep dive that holds what is documented strictly apart from what is merely claimed. You can read it any way you like — but if you want the one honest sentence first: the further any case is investigated, the more it collapses toward the prosaic, and the robustly real thing this record documents is human — how people perceive ambiguous skies, and how belief is built, sold, and institutionalized. Here is how to read the rest.
The one rule: documented vs. claimed
Almost every disagreement about UFOs is really a disagreement about evidence. So every entry here separates two things that usually get blurred: what is actually documented (a radar tape, a recovered sample, a signed report, a lab result) from what is claimed (a memory, a secondhand story, an interpretation). A case can be famous and still rest on almost nothing; a case can be mundane and still be airtight. We label each one with an honest epistemic status rather than a verdict of "real" or "fake."
The eight epistemic statuses
What the 197 cases honestly add up to
Only about 10% stays open after scrutiny — and "open" never means "evidence for." A 2026 adversarial re-audit pressure-tested every open case against the best current prosaic analysis; most were downgraded, including famous instrumented ones like the Nimitz "tic-tac" and Rendlesham, once you notice their decisive data was recalled decades later or never preserved.
The evidence, tier by tier
What deflates under scrutiny
The strongest-sounding cases tend to dissolve when the evidence is examined. The iconic image turns out staged, the "impossible" metal turns out ordinary, the crash relic turns out to be aluminum.
What survives — and what it shares
A handful genuinely hold open. They share one structural feature: a correlated physical or instrumental effect across genuinely independent observers, not a single ambiguous light. And even these mostly hinge on data no one can now re-examine.
The institutional record — the most documented actor of all
The best-evidenced thread is not any craft but the apparatus: the official programs, panels, and laws. They run end to end, and the throughline is the gap between what the files held and what the public was told.
The manufactured myths
Some of the most durable "UFO truths" are products — forged documents, fed scripts, a weaponized mythology assembled from real fragments and citation-laundered into "history."
The resolved genres
Whole categories that once looked anomalous have resolved to a single mundane mechanism — and are reproducible at will.
The human core — testimony and memory
The experiential cases carry no instrument tape: a person encounters something, and what remains is testimony, affect, sometimes a mark. The live question is not "what was the craft" but "what happened to this person" — and how reliable memory is, especially under hypnosis.