The Border Patrol Was Counting UAPs Before Congress Knew It Cared

U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded and catalogued UAP footage as early as April 2013, years before Congress established any formal UAP reporting framework, contradicting the government's public posture that serious federal interest in the phenomenon began around 2017.

The official story goes something like this: the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program leaked in December 2017, the Navy videos followed, Congress got interested, and the government slowly, reluctantly, began taking UAPs seriously. That story has a problem. It is sitting in the National Archives, unrestricted, available to anyone with a browser.

The records live in Record Group 615, the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection, under a series titled "Records from U.S. Customs and Border Protection Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena." The series parent record exists in the catalog. It has no files attached. What it does have is a set of children: thirteen individual video records, each assigned a sequential UAP number, each transferred to NARA and each listed as unrestricted. The catalog entries are accessible at archives.gov right now. The videos themselves are a separate question, one we will get to.

Start with the date that matters most. The record catalogued as "Video pertaining to Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon 9" carries a date of April 26, 2013. That is four years before AATIP became a household name in UAP circles. Four years before the Navy's Nimitz footage entered public consciousness. Four years before Congress began asking pointed questions about what the Pentagon knew and when.

CBP was not just filming something in 2013. It had already assigned that footage a sequential catalogue number within what became a formal federal record group. UAP 9. That implies UAP 1 through UAP 8 existed somewhere in the accounting. It implies someone was keeping count.

A second record, catalogued as "Video pertaining to Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon 10," carries a date of November 1, 2014. Two entries predating the supposed awakening. A filing system does not get to UAP 10 by accident.

Here is where the catalog gets interesting, and where the questions start stacking up.

The numbering runs from UAP 1 through UAP 10 across these records, but the sequence is not chronological. UAP 8 is dated February 3, 2020. UAP 9 is dated April 26, 2013. UAP 10 is dated November 1, 2014. The numbers do not follow the calendar. They follow something else, and the catalog does not say what.

One possibility: the numbering was assigned retroactively when the collection was formalized for NARA transfer. If that is the case, someone made a decision about which older incidents were worth pulling into the official record. That is not a neutral administrative act. Deciding what goes in the box is also deciding what stays out.

The decimal entries make this more interesting, not less. November 23, 2019 produced not one UAP entry but several: UAP 1, UAP 2.1, UAP 2.2, UAP 3.1, and UAP 3.2. Five records from a single date, sub-classified with decimal notation. That is a taxonomy. Someone built infrastructure for distinguishing between incidents that happened close enough together to share a date. That is not ad hoc reporting. That is a system.

The series-level parent record is the detail worth sitting with longest. It exists in the catalog. It is unrestricted. It has zero files attached. A container with no contents is either a record that was never completed, a record whose contents were transferred elsewhere, or a record that is telling us something about what the series-level documentation was supposed to hold and does not. The catalog does not say which. That absence is itself data, even if we cannot say what it means yet.

What we can say: the individual video records exist, they are catalogued, and at least one of them carries a thumbnail image in the NARA catalog, which means the transfer to the archive was not purely nominal. Something moved.

Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022, which created the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office and established the first statutory UAP reporting requirements. That was late 2021. The CBP record dated April 26, 2013 predates that legislation by eight years. The record dated November 1, 2014 predates it by seven.

The government's public posture through most of that period was that UAP reports were taken seriously when they came in but that no systematic collection existed. CBP's archived footage, sitting in a numbered series inside a formal NARA record group, is a federal agency's own answer to that claim. Whether anyone in Congress knew this collection existed before the NARA transfer, the catalog does not say.

Two things are worth watching. First, whether the video files themselves become accessible through NARA's online catalog or through a formal records request. The catalog entries exist and are unrestricted. The videos are a different layer of access, and that distinction matters. An unrestricted catalog entry is not the same as a viewable file.

Second, the gap in the numbering deserves attention. If UAP 9 is from 2013 and UAP 10 is from 2014, where are UAP 1 through UAP 8 in the chronology? Some are accounted for in the 2019 and 2021 records. But the sequence, read against the dates, does not close cleanly. Either the numbering is retroactive and the older incidents were selectively included, or there are incidents in the middle years that did not make it into this transfer. Both possibilities are worth asking CBP about directly.

The archive is open. The questions are specific. That is usually where this kind of story starts moving.

Further Reading: All records cited in this article are held in Record Group 615 at the National Archives. The series parent record (NAID 665701604), the 2013 footage entry (NAID 667114558), the 2014 footage entry (NAID 667114560), and the November 2019 decimal-classified entries (NAID 667114528 and 667114530) are all accessible through the NARA catalog at archives.gov.

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