The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is giving Federal agencies instructions on how to review, identify, and organize records in their custody relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) – or UFOs as they are more commonly known.
On May 9, NARA released the Guidance to Federal Agencies on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection, which instructs agencies on what information is needed to create and manage a governmentwide repository of records dealing with UAPs, as well as how to collect it.
Step one, Federal agencies must prepare and identify all metadata elements. The guidance includes a metadata requirements list that agencies must follow when reviewing, identifying, and organizing each UAP record.
Step two, agencies must conduct an access review of each UAP record and identify which records can be publicly disclosed without any redaction, identify partially restricted records, and create a public access version with redactions and postpone fully restricted UAP records.
Step three, Federal agencies must transfer physical and legal custody of the copies of the fully releasable, restricted in part, and postponed UAP records to the National Archives.
The records must be delivered to NARA as digital copies by the end of the current fiscal year, Sept. 30.
Under a new records management provision — which was tucked into the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act — NARA is required to set up a UAP Records Collection.
NARA began to stand up the records collection earlier this year, urging agencies to begin classifying any UAP-related records in their custody. The recent guidance provides further instruction on what actions agencies need to take.
The collection will consist of “copies of all Government, Government-provided, or Government-funded records relating to [UAPs], technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence (or equivalent subjects by any other name with the specific and sole exclusion of temporarily non-attributed objects),” according to the bill.
Unclassified copies of UAP records transferred to NARA will be made available online in the National Archives catalog. In addition, NARA will integrate an online finding aid into the collection.
