How to Report a UFO Sighting (and What Happens Next)
You saw something you can't explain. Here's how to get it down accurately while it's fresh — and what actually happens to your report afterward.
Most people who witness an unidentified object have never filed a report before, and the moment rarely comes with a notepad in hand. The good news: a useful sighting report doesn't need polished prose or certainty about what you saw. It needs a few concrete details, captured before memory starts smoothing the edges. This guide walks through how to report a UFO sighting in a way that's genuinely useful to you and to everyone else watching the sky.
Write down the basics before anything else
Human memory reorganizes fast, especially when adrenaline is involved. Within the first few minutes, jot down four things: when (the time, as precisely as you can), where (your location and the direction you were looking), how long the object was visible, and what it looked like — shape, color, brightness, and how it moved. If you can only capture one thing, capture the motion: steady hovering, sudden right-angle turns, silent drift, and blinking navigation lights all point in very different directions.
Don't worry about naming it. “A bright amber sphere that held still for thirty seconds, then shot east and vanished” is a far better report than “a UFO.” If you're unsure how to describe the form, our plain-language guide to UFO shapes and terms breaks down the categories most reporting systems use, including the now-famous “Tic Tac.”
Location: precise, approximate, or not at all
Location is what turns a lone anecdote into data. On UFO Intel you choose how precise to be. You can drop a pin exactly where the object was, let your device approximate your position, or leave it at whatever your IP address implies. Precise pins make the map more valuable — clusters only emerge when enough people mark roughly the same patch of sky — but the choice is always yours, and you never need an account to file.
If you took a photo on a phone, it may carry GPS coordinates in its metadata. We can use that to place the pin, and we strip the embedded location data from the stored copy so it isn't published. What the map shows is the sighting; what stays private is you.
Evidence helps, but don't chase it and miss the event
A short, shaky video is worth more than a description written an hour later, so if it's safe and quick, capture what you can. But don't spend the whole encounter fumbling with a camera — a careful eyewitness account of motion and timing is real evidence too. When you do upload media, note what's in frame for reference (a rooftop, a treeline, the moon), because scale and context are exactly what analysts lack when footage arrives with no anchor.
Be honest about conditions. Was it dusk? Were there clouds, wind, aircraft, or a planet like Venus low on the horizon? Noting the mundane possibilities you already ruled out makes your report more credible, not less. The strongest reports read like someone who wanted a conventional explanation and couldn't find one.
What happens after you submit
Your report doesn't vanish into a void. Submissions pass through automated bot and spam filtering, then approved sightings appear on the live sightings map alongside a seed of roughly 60,000 historical reports and curated public-domain cases. Each approved sighting also gets its own shareable page, so you can send a single link to friends, family, or a local group instead of trying to re-describe the whole thing.
We record some technical information with every submission — your IP address, general device information, and location — to keep crowd-sourced reports trustworthy and reduce abuse. That's spelled out plainly on our privacy page; none of it is published on your sighting. What goes public is the shape, time, place, description, and any media you chose to include.
One report is a dot; many are a pattern
The real payoff isn't any single sighting — it's what emerges when reports accumulate. A single amber sphere is an anecdote. Forty of them over one county in a week is something worth a closer look. That's why filing matters even if you're sure someone else must have seen it too. Often they did, and their report is sitting one pin away from yours, waiting for the pattern to connect.
If you'd like a heads-up when activity picks up around you, you can also set up alerts for your area — no password required.
Saw something? Get it on the map.
Filing takes under a minute, works on your phone, and never asks for an account.
Report a Sighting