NUFORC

National UFO Reporting Center — a U.S. civilian sighting-report intake service founded in 1974, operating the most comprehensive public sighting database in North America.

The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) is a Seattle-based civilian organization founded in 1974 by Robert J. Gribble, a former police officer. Its primary function is the intake and public archival of UFO/UAP sighting reports from members of the public.

How it works

NUFORC operates a 24-hour telephone hotline and an online submission form. Reports are received, lightly screened (for obvious abuse or duplication), and added to a public database that is searchable by date, state, country, shape, and duration. Unlike MUFON, NUFORC does not field-investigate the reports — its role is intake, transcription, and archive.

The NUFORC database, freely accessible at nuforc.org, contains over 150,000 reports spanning the organization’s history, making it the largest publicly searchable UFO sighting dataset in North America.

Strengths and limitations

Strengths:

Public accessibility. Anyone can search the full database without registration or fee.
Rapid intake. Reports often appear in the public database within 24 hours.
Geographic coverage. Submissions arrive from throughout the U.S. and increasingly internationally.
Time-series value. The 50-year continuous record allows analysis of long-term reporting patterns.

Limitations:

No vetting. Reports are user-submitted and not verified.
Selection bias. People who know to report to NUFORC are not a random sample of observers.
Description quality varies. Witness descriptions range from highly detailed to cryptic.

Council usage

The Council treats NUFORC as a first-pass dataset — useful for establishing the existence of multi-witness sightings, geographic clustering, and reporting trends, but not as primary evidence on its own. NUFORC reports cited in Council case files are always cross-checked against independent sources before being treated as substantive.

The Council recommends NUFORC to readers wanting to understand the texture of public UAP reporting; serious investigation requires additional sources.

Related entries

MUFON

Mutual UFO Network — the largest civilian UFO investigation organization in the United States, founded in 1969 and operating a structured field-investigator network.

UFO

Unidentified Flying Object — the older, original term for anomalous aerial phenomena, in U.S. government usage from approximately 1952 until replacement by 'UAP' in 2021.

UAP

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (formerly Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) — the U.S. government's preferred term for what was historically called UFOs, deliberately broader to include maritime, space, and transmedium objects.

Project Blue Book

The U.S. Air Force's primary UFO investigation program from 1952 to 1969, which examined 12,618 reports and concluded that 701 remained 'unidentified' after investigation.