A practical guide to filing a UAP sighting report that meets the Council's evidentiary standards. Covers timestamps, location precision, witness corroboration, and the documentation that converts an account into a record.
The Council receives a substantial volume of sighting submissions through the public form. Most are not published. The reasons are nearly always procedural rather than substantive: missing timestamps, imprecise location, no witness corroboration, no instrumented record. This guide describes what we look for in a submission worth taking seriously.
What this guide does NOT do
This guide does not teach you how to make a UAP sighting more credible than it actually is. It teaches you how to document an honest observation in a way that survives the Council’s review process. A weak observation documented well will be honestly marked as inconclusive. A strong observation documented poorly will not be published at all.
Step 1 — At the moment of observation
If you are reading this guide before your first sighting, congratulations on preparation. The single most important habit is to note the time at the moment you first see something, before you do anything else. Look at your phone, look at your watch, say the time aloud — anything that creates a verifiable timestamp.
If you have a Rite in the Rain notebook and a flashlight (the Fenix PD36R Pro has a red night-vision mode that won’t kill your dark adaptation), open the notebook immediately. Write:
- Time. To the minute. Write what your watch said.
- Direction. Approximate compass bearing. “Northwest” is fine; “between Ursa Minor and Cassiopeia” is better.
- Altitude angle. “Just above the horizon” or “directly overhead” or “about 45 degrees up.” Roughly horizontal arm-extension marks ~30 degrees.
- Apparent size. Compare to a known reference. “About the size of a fingernail at arm’s length” or “smaller than the Moon.”
These four pieces of information take 30 seconds to record and are the difference between a sighting we can analyze and a sighting we cannot.
Step 2 — Location precision
Location is where most submissions fail. “Outside Phoenix” is not a location. The Council needs decimal-degree coordinates, ideally with five decimal places (sub-meter precision).
The cleanest way to get this is a dedicated GPS device. The Council’s standard recommendation is the Garmin GPSMAP 67 — a multi-band GNSS handheld with sub-meter accuracy and 180-hour battery life. Submissions filed with GPSMAP-recorded coordinates are scored higher in the Council’s verdict engine, because the location is verifiable and the device’s metadata is retrievable.
If you don’t have a dedicated GPS, your phone’s location services produce approximate coordinates. Take a screenshot of your map app showing your position with the coordinates visible. Then write the coordinates in your notebook.
For the observation direction — i.e., where the object was — coordinates are not enough. You need bearing (compass direction) and elevation angle from your position.
Step 3 — Witness corroboration
A single-witness sighting is filed but rarely published as a primary case. Two or more independent witnesses changes the evidentiary picture substantially. If you are with people, the moment after recording your own initial notes, ask each witness to independently write down or describe what they see.
Critical: do not influence each other. Don’t say “do you see the triangle?” Say: “Tell me what you see.” Get their description before they see your notes.
If possible, have witnesses describe:
- The shape and color (in their words).
- The motion (their words).
- The duration (how long until they noticed it; how long they have been watching).
- Their location relative to yours.
The Council treats witness statements that contradict each other in small details as more credible than statements that match perfectly — perfect agreement suggests collaboration, not corroboration.
Step 4 — Recording media
Photos, video, and audio are powerful evidence when present and legitimate. They are not required for a publishable sighting, but their absence requires more rigorous narrative documentation.
If you record:
- Time-stamp the recording. Most devices do this automatically; verify by checking file metadata afterward.
- Don’t crop, filter, or color-correct. Provide the original file.
- Note your camera’s specifications. Phone model, lens, focal length, exposure settings — all in your notes.
- Pan to a known reference at some point during the recording. A landmark, a constellation, a building. This anchors the recording in a verifiable scene.
Video is more useful than still photos because it captures motion. If the object is producing apparent motion, the video preserves the kinematic data; a still photo loses it.
Step 5 — The submission itself
When you submit through aliencouncil.com/sighting/new, the form asks for the elements above in structured fields. The narrative section is for the story — what happened in human terms, in your own words. The Council reads narratives carefully; a clear, honest, calm narrative carries weight.
Write in past tense. Write what you observed, not what you concluded. “At 22:14 MST I saw a single bright light moving from northwest to southeast. It was silent and traveled across approximately 30 degrees of sky in 90 seconds. I lost it behind a tree line.” — that is a publishable narrative.
Avoid: speculation about origin, comparison to media UFO footage, extrapolation beyond what you observed.
What happens next
Submissions are reviewed by the Council’s verdict engine within 48 hours. Each receives one of four verdicts: Confirmed, Inconclusive, Debunked, or Watching. The verdict comes with a brief written reasoning, citing relevant existing cases and explaining the basis for the classification.
A verdict of Inconclusive is not a rejection. The majority of cases in the Council’s archive carry that verdict — including the most evidentially substantial ones (Case #00041 — Tic Tac, Case #00131 — Hessdalen Lights). “Inconclusive” means the evidence is real but does not compel a stronger conclusion, which is itself a respectable outcome.
Council recommended
For the kind of basic preparedness this guide describes, the Council’s standing minimum kit is:
- Rite in the Rain notebook — waterproof field notes
- Garmin GPSMAP 67 — verifiable coordinates
- Fenix PD36R Pro flashlight — red mode preserves dark adaptation
Submissions made with this kit are not magic — they are simply the minimum-viable documentation that survives review.
Related cases
- Case #00041 — USS Nimitz “Tic Tac” — the modern reference standard for what credible reporting looks like.
- Case #00131 — Hessdalen lights — the citizen-science model for sustained instrumented observation.
- Case #00482 — 3I/Atlas — the pattern of how anomalous-but-natural events are documented.