UFOSEARCH

UFOSearch is a grounded, searchable index of the declassified government record on unidentified aerial phenomena — the actual files released by national governments, unified into one place where you can ask a question in plain English and read the real documents that answer it.

Every result is a verbatim page from a real government document, linked back to its official source — the exact scan where one’s available, or the government archive it came from. Nothing here is AI-generated, and nothing is embellished. When the record doesn’t support an answer, the honest response is “insufficient evidence” — not a guess.

Where the data comes from

Everything is sourced from official government archives and their public releases. Current holdings:

How it was built

Each collection follows the same grounded pipeline:

1. Acquire the files from the official archive (national archives, FOIA releases, agency portals).
2. Extract the text — directly where documents are born-digital, or via OCR for scanned paper (many of these are decades-old typed and handwritten reports).
3. Chunk each document into passages, keeping page anchors so results point back to a location in the source.
4. Embed every passage with a multilingual model (bge-m3) into a vector index, so search works by meaning, not just keywords.
5. Retrieve with a hybrid of keyword (BM25) and semantic (vector) search, fused for relevance.
6. Link every document back to its original source so you can verify it yourself.

What you can search

• Plain English (or French/Portuguese). Describe what you’re looking for — “a disc pacing a military jet,” “radar tracked a target no aircraft could match” — and semantic search finds relevant passages even when they use different words.
• Filter by collection to search within one country or agency.
• Read the source. Open any result to see the full page text and a link to the original document.

What this is — and isn’t

These are investigation, intelligence, and sighting files. There is no “alien” document class, because no such thing exists in the government record — so this index never implies more than the documents say. The files record what people reported and what officials concluded; a sighting report is not proof of anything, and government conclusions (identified, balloon, aircraft, unexplained) are presented as what the agency determined, not as ground truth.

Text is shown verbatim, including redactions and OCR artifacts. That’s deliberate: the point is to show exactly what the record says, warts and all.

Honest caveats