The FAA Was Feeding Pilot UAP Reports Into the Pentagon's Intelligence Architecture During the 2023 Shootdowns — And Never Said So

FILE ZERO | Investigative

On February 10, 2023, the U.S. military shot down an unidentified object over Alaska. That same day, a UPS cargo pilot filed a UAP report with the FAA. That report is now sitting in the National Archives next to a Pentagon intelligence document, in the same record group, under the same collection number.

Nobody announced that.

Here's what most people think they know about FAA UAP reports: pilots rarely file them, and when they do, the records disappear into a FOIA backlog for years before anyone sees them. The FAA doesn't have a formal UAP program. It's a traffic agency. It moves planes. That's the public posture, and it's been the public posture for decades.

The National Archives tells a different story.

Record Group 615 is the unified collection Congress created under the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023. It was built to house national security-level UAP records — the kind that come from the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence. The FY2023 and FY2024 consolidated annual reports from both OSD and ODNI live there, the official government assessments of the UAP phenomenon, the ones that get cited in congressional hearings and press briefings.

FAA pilot incident logs live there too.

Not in a separate series. Not in a parallel collection. In the same Record Group. Under a dedicated series titled Records from the Federal Aviation Administration Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Forty-three separate FAA records, filed alongside the Secretary of Defense's annual UAP report, accessible to anyone with a browser and fifteen minutes.

Someone decided that FAA pilot observations belong in the same collection as national intelligence assessments. That decision was made somewhere, by someone, and it has never been publicly announced.

Now look at the dates.

February 4, 2023: the Chinese surveillance balloon is shot down off the South Carolina coast. February 10: an object is downed over Alaska. February 11: another over Canada's Yukon. February 12: a fourth over Lake Huron.

The National Archives contains six separate FAA UAP reports filed between February 3 and February 13, 2023.

Six. In ten days.

The UPS cargo flight on February 10 — the day of the Alaska shootdown — is one of them. A United Airlines flight filed a report on February 11, the day of the Yukon shootdown. A business jet with an ICV prefix — a Citation Excel, the kind of aircraft operated by private charter and corporate flight departments, not major carriers with institutional reporting habits — filed on February 12. That's the Lake Huron day.

The ICV registration is worth pausing on. Private operators have no incentive to report UAP activity. No mandatory protocol. No career upside. The fact that this one did, and that the FAA collected it, and that it ended up in RG 615 alongside Pentagon intelligence reports, suggests the FAA wasn't passively receiving whatever happened to come in during that window. It was paying attention.

Two additional reports carry the same date — February 10 — with consecutive catalog numbers. Two distinct records, same day, filed sequentially. Either two separate pilots reported on the same day the military was shooting something down over Alaska, or one event generated two separate intake records. Neither explanation is consistent with an agency that has no formal UAP collection mechanism.

The government's official account of those four days in February 2023 described objects the military couldn't immediately identify, scrambled jets, and a White House that was, by its own characterization, still working to understand what it was dealing with. Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters the administration didn't have "anything to add" on the question of whether the objects posed a threat. The Pentagon said the objects were "uncharacterized." The official line was uncertainty.

What the official line never mentioned: commercial and private aviation was also reporting anomalous objects during the same window, in real time, and those reports were being routed into the same intelligence architecture as the military's own UAP assessments.

If the FAA was feeding civilian pilot sightings into a unified collection during active shootdown operations — operations the government described as responding to objects it couldn't identify — then the government's public account of those four days has a gap in it. A structural one. Not a matter of classification. The records are unrestricted. Anyone can pull them from catalog.archives.gov right now.

Here's the detail that doesn't fit the passive-collection explanation.

The FAA records in RG 615 span from May 2022 through October 2024. Dozens of routine reports, spread across two and a half years. The February 2023 cluster is the only ten-day window in the entire collection where six reports stack up in sequence. Every other period shows one report here, one there, weeks apart.

That density doesn't happen by accident. It happens when someone is actively flagging, soliciting, or cross-filing reports during a specific operational window.

The question isn't whether the FAA collected these reports. It clearly did. The question is whether "collected" is the right word — or whether "coordinated" fits better.

The ODNI's FY2024 annual UAP report, now publicly accessible through the same National Archives collection, describes an "expanded collection posture" and integration of data from non-traditional sources. It doesn't specify what those sources are. It doesn't mention the FAA.

It doesn't need to. The filing cabinet already answers that question.

What to watch: The UAP Disclosure Act mandated records transfer to NARA on a rolling basis. More FAA records are likely coming. Watch for whether the February 2023 cluster expands — additional reports from that window, from aircraft not yet represented in the current collection, would confirm coordinated intake rather than coincidence. Also worth watching: whether any of the February 2023 FAA records carry geographic metadata that places them in proximity to the military shootdown corridors. The catalog entries don't show that yet. The documents themselves might.

The archive is open. The records are unrestricted. The dates are right there.

Stay curious.

Follow along: @boggleriley | spacedew.com

Further Reading — National Archives RG 615:
- UPS1052 UAP Report, February 10, 2023
- ICV93PK UAP Report, February 12, 2023
- UAL2059 UAP Report, February 11, 2023
- FAA UAP Report, February 10, 2023 — Record A
- FAA UAP Report, February 10, 2023 — Record B
- ODNI FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP
- OSD FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP