Most sightings came from U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force aviators that saw flying objects while on duty.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has released an unclassified report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), more commonly known as UFO sightings.
The office received new reports and uncovered reports from old files that pushed the existing 144 UAP reports to now over 500, according to the office's UAP annual report.
The tracking agency had a total of 510 UAP reports as of August 2022. Of those, 247 were new reports, and 119 were reported or discovered after the preliminary assessments cut-off time, the report stated.
All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and the ODNI, which both work to track the UAP sightings, believe the nearly 400-report increase can be attributed to a better understanding of possible threats that UAPs present and a decrease in stigma around reporting UAPs.
The AARO was able to analyze some of the reports and characterized 163 sightings as a balloon or balloon-like entities, 26 were characterized as Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) or UAS-like, and 6 were characterized as clutter, such as birds, plastic bags, or weather events, stated the report.
The remaining 171 uncharacterized UAPs required more analysis and some showed “unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities,” stated the report.
Most of the sightings came from U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force aviators that saw the flying objects while on duty.
