National UFO Reporting Center
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🏢 Organization
Contents 7
| Type | Organization |
|---|---|
| Also known as | NUFORC |
The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) is a non-profit corporation registered in Washington State that collects reports of UFO sightings and alleged contacts from the public.[1] It was founded in 1974 by Robert J. Gribble and has catalogued almost 170,000 reported sightings, most of them in the United States.[1] It runs a 24-hour hotline and an online reporting form, and its database is one of the most widely cited sources of sighting data.[1][3] Peter Davenport has directed it since 1994. In 2006 it moved from Seattle to a former Atlas nuclear missile site in eastern Washington.[1][3] The Federal Aviation Administration names it as an example of where pilots and controllers can report UFOs.[5]
History
Robert Gribble
According to the Los Angeles Times, Robert Gribble was a retired Seattle firefighter who for two decades had acted as a one-man clearinghouse for UFO information. He ran a national UFO hotline around the clock.[3] The Wikipedia account and a 2023 aviation paper date the centre's founding to 1974.[1][5] The Los Angeles Times described the centre in 2008 as "in continuous operation since 1970".[3]
Peter Davenport
In 1994 Gribble telephoned Peter Davenport and asked him to take over. Davenport accepted and kept the same hotline number.[3] Davenport had earned degrees in biology and Russian at Stanford and graduate degrees in genetics and fish biochemistry at the University of Washington. He was the founding president of a Seattle-area biotechnology company, BioSyn, and sold his stock in 1994.[3] He traced his interest to a bright red disc he said he saw at a drive-in theatre in St. Louis at the age of six, in 1954. The Wikipedia account also links his interest to the 1955 Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter.[1][3] Christian Stepien, a technology entrepreneur, has served as the centre's chief technology officer over the same period.[1]
Davenport describes himself as a UFO believer but a skeptic. The skeptic James Oberg has praised the centre as a valuable service.[1] Davenport told the Los Angeles Times that up to 90 per cent of sightings were explainable as weather balloons, military aircraft, satellites and the like, and that many more were hoaxes. He also said a small handful each year were something genuinely unexplained.[3]
The missile site
For about a dozen years Davenport ran the centre from a rented house near Seattle's University District.[3] Around 2006 he bought Atlas Missile Site No. 6, about 50 miles west of Spokane, for $100,000. It was a "coffin launcher" decommissioned by the Air Force in the mid-1960s, with a blast door weighing 4,000 pounds and a launch control room under 16-foot ceilings.[1][3] He stored tens of thousands of sighting files in filing cabinets in the former missile room. Because the site leaked and was poorly ventilated, he kept the phone and answering machine at an apartment in nearby Harrington while he repaired it.[3]
Operations
- Hotline and form. Since its founding the centre has run a 24-hour telephone line for people to report sightings as they happen. It later added an online form.[1][2] In 2008 the Los Angeles Times reported up to 20,000 calls a year.[3]
- Investigations. Davenport told the Los Angeles Times in 2008 that he investigated compelling cases in person if they were a short flight away, took written reports and testimony, and consulted experts.[3] A 2023 paper co-authored by NARCAP said the centre no longer had an active investigation function.[5]
- Staff and money. The 2023 paper said the centre was staffed by two people, the director and a technical officer.[5] Apart from donations, it has been funded almost entirely by Davenport and Stepien. The cost has been estimated at $500 to $5,000 a month, depending on travel.[1][3]
- The database. The public database shows only a summary of each report. It can be searched by date, state, shape or posting date, and credentialed investigators can request fuller reports.[5] The centre says it cannot verify the data, and its reports include hoaxes and identified objects as well as possible unknowns.[4][5]
- Statistics. NUFORC has supplied statistics, graphs and maps to others. Slate published an interactive graph by Davenport showing the density of sightings.[1]
Use of the data
The centre says its hotline and website are known to law enforcement agencies, FAA air traffic centres and flight service stations, National Weather Service offices, military facilities, NASA and many 911 dispatch centres, which routinely pass UFO calls to it.[5] The FAA's guidance for pilots and controllers tells people to contact a civilian reporting centre "such as National UFO Reporting Center".[5] Police in Lebanon, Missouri, and in Arizona have referred sightings to the centre. Arizona relied on it after the 1997 Phoenix Lights, which Davenport has called genuine.[1] MUFON has worked with NUFORC to publicise trends in sighting reports, and the centre has been featured on Coast to Coast AM.[1] See MUFON.
The NARCAP paper argued that NUFORC's reputation was built in earlier decades. It said the centre was being overshadowed by other reporting organisations, and that its reliance on a long-serving director in his seventies made its future uncertain.[5] See NARCAP.
The earlier version of this article said NUFORC's data are widely used by journalists and data analysts. The sources read here support that it supplies statistics and maps and is widely cited. They do not discuss data analysts as such.[1]
References
- National UFO Reporting Center — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- NUFORC, "About us" · nuforc.org · archived copy
- "Seeking UFOs, deep underground", Los Angeles Times (March 2008), archived · web.archive.org · archived copy
- "Close encounters: everything you need to know about UFOs", The Economist (2014), archived · web.archive.org · archived copy
- "Recommendations to Improve Acquisition and Management of Aviation-Related UAP Data" (AIAA AV23, 2023), NARCAP · narcap.org
Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “National UFO Reporting Center”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
This page was last edited on 31 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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