The National UFO Reporting Center says it received its 200,000th sighting report in August, a milestone it announced on September 7. The civilian organization described an archive that grew from handwritten accounts in a filing cabinet to a searchable collection covering every US state and most countries.
Founded in 1974, NUFORC collects accounts from members of the public rather than operating as a government investigation office. Its institutional history says the website has operated since 1995, after an earlier reliance on telephone calls and postal submissions. Peter Davenport has directed the center since 1994.
The announcement points readers to nearly 2,000 reports highlighted over the past four years for what the center considers their detail and credibility. It also links individual witness accounts. Those selections reflect NUFORC's assessment; the total is a count of submissions, not a tally of independently verified unusual craft.
The expanding archive gives researchers more testimony to compare, but a larger collection alone cannot establish the identity of reported objects or their origin. NUFORC's interpretation of the reports remains distinct from what can be demonstrated by any particular photograph, recording or corroborating record.