The National UFO Reporting Center was founded in 1974 by Robert J. Gribble. Over five decades it has processed more than 180,000 UAP sighting reports, operating continuously since 1974 as a non-profit Washington State corporation. Its database is the largest independently collected set of UAP sighting reports publicly available on the internet. In August 2025 NUFORC formally collaborated with the federal government’s UAP investigation office for the first time.
The AARO-NUFORC Workshop — August 2025
In early August 2025, NUFORC participated in the “2025 UAP Workshop: Narrative Data, Infrastructures, and Analysis” — a multi-day event held in the Washington DC area, sponsored by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and hosted by Associated Universities Inc. (AUI). AARO Director Jon Kosloski delivered opening remarks. Robert Powell of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies delivered the keynote. The workshop’s stated goals: standardise UAP narrative data collection, integrate data from multiple organisations into interoperable systems, and apply AI to large-scale UAP datasets.
Other attending organisations: NUFOHRC (National UFO Historical Record Center), SCU (Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies), the Galileo Project, UAPx, the Society for UAP Studies, the Archives of the Impossible, academic researchers, historians, and AI experts specialising in large-scale data analysis. Day 2 included a hackathon where participants worked hands-on with real-world UAP data sets. This is the first formally documented event where AARO and civilian UAP databases worked in the same room, toward the same analytical infrastructure.
NUFORC’s Leadership
Peter Davenport has directed NUFORC since 1994. His background: Stanford bachelor’s degrees in Russian and biology plus a Russian translator’s certificate, University of Washington MS in genetics and biochemistry plus an MBA in finance and international business. Former commercial fisherman, Russian translator aboard Soviet fishing vessels, fisheries observer, flight instructor, biotech founder, and former MUFON Washington director. He ran for Congress twice. NUFORC CTO Christian Stepien joined in 1994 as database developer: Case Western Reserve BS and MS in electrical engineering, former GE robotics and voice recognition engineer, sold Experlogix software company in 2019.
The Database Structure
NUFORC’s 160,192+ entries are tiered: Tier 1 (most dramatic — structured craft at close range), Tier 2 (objects with anomalous characteristics: speed, non-inertial turns, unknown propulsion), Tier 3 (unexplained), Tier 4 (explainable by known phenomena). Reports prior to March 2023 are not yet graded. Indexes by event date, state/country, UFO shape, and posting date are publicly accessible. Law enforcement agencies, FAA ATC facilities, National Weather Service offices, military facilities, NASA, and 911 dispatch centres routinely direct UAP-related calls to NUFORC.
Source: nuforc.org/about-us. nuforc.org/nuforc-aaro-workshop. NUFORC databank page. AARO workshop documentation August 2025.