ODNI Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (2021)
🏛️ Office of the Director of National Intelligence
A nine-page unclassified report to Congress on 144 UAP reports from U.S. government sources, mostly military aviators, between 2004 and 2021.
Key points
- Only one of the 144 reports was explained with high confidence: a large, deflating balloon.
- 18 incidents described unusual movement, such as hovering in wind or sudden speed, which needed more analysis.
- It proposed five likely groups of explanation: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric events, U.S. secret programs, foreign adversary systems, and “other”.
- It blamed limited data and the stigma pilots faced for reporting.
Why it matters
It was the first time the U.S. intelligence community publicly said most military UAP reports could not be explained.
Read it yourself
The summary above is ours, written in plain English. Always check the original: the official files on this page go straight to the source, and each one has a backup copy saved by the Internet Archive in case the government page moves.
Office of the Director of National Intelligence. (2021). ODNI Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (2021). https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdfRelated records
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