What the federal UFO record actually says about Central and Upstate New York

By the CNY Signal Newsroom

On May 8, 2026, the U.S. Department of Defense, now operating publicly under the secondary title “Department of War” authorized by an executive order in September 2025, posted 162 declassified files to a new portal at war.gov/UFO. The files, branded the PURSUE archive (Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters), include 120 PDFs, 28 videos, and 14 image files spanning 1948 to 2026. According to NPR’s coverage of the launch, the package includes Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 archival imagery depicting unidentified objects on the lunar horizon. The Pentagon called it the largest single Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena release in U.S. history.

The release is the latest in a 78-year arc of federal investigation into objects in U.S. airspace that the government cannot identify. For Central New York and the broader Upstate region, that arc has a long shadow. A New York fighter jet crashed into a Walesville intersection 35 miles east of Syracuse in 1954 after the pilot ejected during an interception of an unidentified target, killing four civilians. On the November 9, 1965 Northeast blackout, named witnesses including the Syracuse Deputy Aviation Commissioner reported a fireball-style object over the Hancock Field area within a minute of the grid collapse. A Chautauqua County dairy farm hosted a 1965 sighting that the Air Force itself classified as UNIDENTIFIED, with a corroborating radar log from a Niagara County radar squadron. A Hudson Valley sighting wave in the early 1980s drew 5,000 or more witnesses across three counties before the New York State Police announced much of it had been a hoax pulled off by light-aircraft pilots.

This is what the federal record actually shows for New York, what local outlets have credibly documented since, and what remains unexplained.

The federal arc: 78 years, 12,618 cases, 701 unsolved

The first U.S. government program to study unidentified flying objects was Project Sign, launched in 1947 after Kenneth Arnold’s well-publicized sighting near Mount Rainier. Sign was succeeded by Project Grudge in 1949 and then by Project Blue Book, the program most readers know by name, which received its formal designation in March 1952 and ran until December 17, 1969. By the time the Air Force closed Blue Book, it had reviewed 12,618 cases. Of those, 701 were classified as unidentified, meaning the Air Force could not explain them with the technology and information available at the time. The official Air Force position is that no Blue Book case showed evidence of being beyond the technology then known.

For more than five decades after Blue Book closed, the federal government had no formal program to investigate UAP. That changed in July 2022, when Congress directed the Department of Defense to establish the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, AARO, with a mandate to integrate efforts across the military and intelligence community. AARO’s first major public deliverable was its Historical Record Report Volume I, cleared by DoD prepublication review and posted on March 8, 2024. The report described AARO’s review of 7,252 Project Blue Book files containing 65,778 digital records held by the U.S. National Archives, plus a survey of roughly two dozen separate U.S. government UAP-related investigative efforts since 1945.

The most recent AARO output is its FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP, released November 14, 2024. The report, signed off by AARO Director Dr. Jon Kosloski, documented 757 new UAP reports during the May 1, 2023 to June 1, 2024 reporting window. Of those, 485 occurred in-period and 272 were backlog reports from 2021 to 2022. AARO’s total holdings reached 1,652 reports as of October 24, 2024. Per the report, AARO resolved 118 cases as prosaic, meaning identified as conventional aircraft, drones, balloons, satellites, sensor artifacts, or known atmospheric phenomena, and queued an additional 174 for finalization. Twenty-one cases were flagged for further detailed study. The report identified zero cases as evidence of extraterrestrial origin.

The NASA Independent Study Team Report, published September 14, 2023, reviewed the same body of data as an outside civilian-science panel rather than as a defense or intelligence body. Team chair David Spergel told reporters at the press briefing that the team found no evidence to suggest UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin. The report noted that of more than 800 unclassified DoD and AARO sightings reviewed, only a small handful could not be immediately identified as known human-made or natural phenomena.

The Pentagon videos that started the modern era

Public conversation about military UAP changed on April 27, 2020, when the U.S. Navy formally declassified and released three videos that had circulated unofficially for years. The videos, named FLIR1, Gimbal, and Go Fast, came from F/A-18 Super Hornet ATFLIR pods. FLIR1 was recorded in November 2004 off the USS Nimitz strike group and shows what Navy aviators described as a Tic Tac-shaped object. Gimbal and Go Fast were both recorded in January 2015 by aircraft from the USS Theodore Roosevelt strike group and show, respectively, a rotating object above clouds and a fast-moving low-altitude object.

Those three videos remain the most-cited official evidence in the AARO era. Subsequent releases include MQ-9 drone footage of an apparent metallic orb captured over the Middle East on July 12, 2022, and additional South Asia and Western USA sensor footage. AARO’s analysis of the 2021 Western USA case concluded the three objects were commercial aircraft seen at a distance, an example AARO Director Kosloski has cited as an illustration of how the office’s resolution methodology actually works.

The deadliest New York incident: Walesville, July 2, 1954

The most consequential UAP-adjacent incident in New York state history is the Walesville crash. Just before noon on July 2, 1954, a Lockheed F-94C Starfire interceptor, tail number 51-13559, scrambled from Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome to investigate an unidentified aircraft over central New York. The crew, after intercepting and identifying the first object as a U.S. Air Force C-47 transport, was vectored to a second unidentified target. Project Blue Book’s case file documents that the second target was never positively identified.

The interception ended badly. The cockpit temperature climbed sharply, the engine-fire light triggered, and the crew ejected. The pilotless F-94C continued on its trajectory and crashed into a Walesville intersection, striking a home and a passing automobile. Four civilians were killed: Stanley Phillips, 38; Florence Phillips, 32; their son Gary Phillips, 11; and Doris Monroe, 28. The Air Force’s official report attributed the loss of the aircraft to engine trouble. An unnamed Mohawk Airlines pilot, quoted by the New York Times that week, reported a “light apparently shining” the same day in the area. The Rome Sentinel revisited the case in a 2018 retrospective by reporter Ron Klopfanstein, which describes the official explanation as straining credulity.

What is unambiguous is the human cost. Walesville is the deadliest UAP-adjacent incident in New York state history regardless of whether the underlying second target is ever explained. The Phillips family and Doris Monroe are named in the Project Blue Book file.

The Cherry Creek case is still on the books as UNIDENTIFIED

The other New York case the federal record never closed sits 250 miles west of Walesville. On the evening of August 19, 1965, the Butcher family farm in Cherry Creek, Chautauqua County, recorded what the Project Blue Book final disposition file lists as a “true unknown” or unidentified case. The primary witness was Harold Butcher, then 16, working in the dairy barn on his father William Butcher’s farm. The witness account describes a roughly 50-foot football-shaped metallic object that produced static interference, stopped the milking equipment, and left a purplish liquid residue and singed grass on the ground.

What gives the Cherry Creek case its weight in the federal record is corroborating military radar. The AN/FPS-6 Long Range Height Finder Radar of the 763rd Radar Squadron at Lockport Air Force Station in Niagara County logged a momentary target between 8:00 and 8:30 PM EDT, contemporaneous with the witness account. New York State Police, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, and a five-man Air Force investigation team interviewed the family. The case file is held in National Archives Record Group 341 and is still publicly available through the Center for UFO Studies and the Project Blue Book Archive.

Hancock Field, Syracuse, and the November 9, 1965 blackout sightings

Syracuse sits inside the geography of two separate Cold War interceptor stories. The first is the Walesville F-94C Starfire that scrambled from Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome. The second is Hancock Field, the Syracuse Air National Guard base 8 miles northeast of downtown that was simultaneously home to the 138th Fighter Squadron flying F-94 Starfires from 1954 through 1957, per the 174th Attack Wing’s official lineage documented in the Wikipedia entry on the unit and the Air National Guard’s own history. The same aircraft type that crashed in Walesville was based at Hancock during the same period.

The most-documented UAP cluster tied directly to the Hancock Field area is the Northeast blackout of November 9, 1965. Within roughly a minute of the regional power failure at 5:16 PM EST, Syracuse Deputy Aviation Commissioner Robert C. Walsh was airborne and observed a large illuminated object near the airport, which he landed at without incident. Weldon Ross, a veteran flight instructor, and his student James Brooking reported a fiery object positioned over the Clay sub-station while on approach to a darkened Hancock. William Stillwell, sexton at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, observed a stationary red object through a 117-power telescope for roughly two hours. The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena’s compiled case file, posted at nicap.org/nyne.htm, attributes the witness accounts to contemporaneous Syracuse Herald-Journal reporting and to Yurko Bondarchuk’s 1979 chronology. The Federal Power Commission’s official cause for the blackout, a tripped relay at the Sir Adam Beck plant on the Niagara River in Ontario, was published the following week. NICAP records the witness count for Hancock Field area sightings around the blackout in the dozens.

Hancock’s mission has changed twice since. The last two F-16s departed Hancock Field on March 6, 2010, ending fighter operations at the base. The 174th was redesignated the 174th Attack Wing on September 9, 2012, and now flies the MQ-9 Reaper remotely piloted aircraft from Syracuse. AARO’s FY2024 Annual Report references MQ-9 sensor data as a contributing input to the office’s UAP holdings nationwide, though no public AARO case file as of publication has been tied by name to a Hancock-launched MQ-9 mission.

Eight other New York Blue Book cases still listed as unsolved

Cherry Creek is the most documented New York entry in the Blue Book unidentified column, but it is not the only one. The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena maintains the curated list of Blue Book unidentified cases, sourced from the National Archives Record Group 341 holdings.

The Hudson Valley wave: 5,000 witnesses, “the Martians,” and the Indian Point dispute

From 1982 through 1986, more than 5,000 people in Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess, and parts of Orange and Rockland counties reported seeing a large boomerang or V-shaped object, often described as the size of a football field, moving slowly across the night sky outlined in white, red, and green lights. The peak event was March 24, 1983. A hotline operated by researchers connected to former Project Blue Book scientific advisor Dr. J. Allen Hynek logged more than 300 calls in a 48-hour window. The Westchester-Rockland Daily Item ran a March 26, 1983 front page reading “HUNDREDS CLAIM TO HAVE SEEN UFO.”

The 5,000-witness figure comes from Hynek and researcher Philip Imbrogno, whose 1987 book “Night Siege” remains the most cited chronicle of the wave. It is a researcher tally, not a government count, and is properly attributed as such. The New York Times covered the wave in an August 25, 1984 piece by Jeffrey Schmalz, “Strange Sights Brighten the Night Skies Upstate,” which named Sergeant Kenneth V. Spiro of New York State Police Troop K as one of the officers who fielded reports.

The official explanation came back as a hoax. The New York State Police and the Federal Aviation Administration concluded that a group of pilots from Stormville Airport in Dutchess County had been flying five or six Cessna 152 light planes in tight formation, with their wings as close as six inches apart and their undersides painted black to mask outlines, with switchable colored lights mounted to suggest a single large illuminated craft. The pilots, who reportedly told troopers they were “the Martians” and were amused by the public reaction, were never charged. The Center for UFO Studies investigator Philip Imbrogno publicly disputed the hoax explanation for several specific incidents within the wave. The official record stands.

The most contested incident within the wave is the Indian Point nuclear plant report. On July 24, 1984, multiple security guards at the Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, Westchester County, reported seeing a roughly 900-foot V- or boomerang-shaped craft hovering above the reactor 3 building. The account is sourced primarily to Imbrogno’s research and was the subject of a follow-on Hynek and Imbrogno book chapter. John Branciforte, the Power Authority security commander, is on record disputing Imbrogno’s account, saying of the alleged shotgun-issuance order, “We just don’t do things like that.” The Indian Point dispute is, accurately characterized, a documented disagreement between a UFO researcher and an on-record plant security official. It is not a confirmed encounter.

Recent CNY local reports, 2024 and 2025

The most recent New York UAP reports come from a mix of credentialed local outlets and the National UFO Reporting Center, the largest publicly searchable witness database. NUFORC entries are self-reported and not government-verified; they conflate hoaxes, mistakes, identified flying objects such as Starlink trains, and genuinely unexplained reports. With that caveat, NUFORC logged 66 New York sightings in the first half of 2025 and 65 in the same period of 2024. Fox News reported the 2025 figure on April 6, 2025.

The Rome Sentinel and other CNY outlets have covered specific cases. The Rome Sentinel’s full 2024 tally, published April 6, 2025 under the byline Will Phillips, lists 11 NUFORC entries from Central New York for that calendar year. None of the 11 entries publish the witness’s name; the Sentinel notes that NUFORC entries are submitted with names withheld by default. The relevant cases, by date and town, are: January 14 Ithaca, the commercial pilot at 28,000 feet reporting white and yellow lights rapidly changing direction with multiple corroborating pilots in the same airspace and nothing on radar; February 14 DeWitt, two witnesses reporting a large dark grey boomerang-shaped object flying silently at low altitude near treetops; February 20 Owego, a vertical needle-like object with bright red, blue, and white lights; April 17 Burlington Flats, multiple small orbs and a large bright orb that transformed into a round shape with a spinning ring; June 17 Bainbridge, a meteorologist capturing four lights in square formation on a security camera; July 26 Harpursville, two separate reports of a glowing orb moving at satellite speed; September 13 Poland, a bright jiggling white light stationary then moving vertically; October 3 Rome, a witness claiming to find a tiny metallic object emitting a faint blue light; October 21 Auburn, a bright white flower-shaped object with jagged edges; November 22 Syracuse city limits, a bright orange-yellow light releasing a smaller red-orange light; December 9 Chenango Forks, multiple points of light moving independently. In March 2025, an airline pilot and co-pilot over Fort Edward, Washington County reported a solid green cigar-shaped craft hovering within 500 feet of the cockpit, with the co-pilot grounded the next day after filing a formal report, per cnynews.com on March 21, 2025. None of these reports has been resolved by AARO publicly.

The scholarly footprint on UAP in Central and Upstate New York is anchored by Cornell University, not Syracuse University. Carl Sagan, professor of astronomy at Cornell from 1968 until his death in 1996, served on the 1966 Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project Blue Book commissioned by the U.S. Air Force, and helped organize the 1969 American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium on UFOs, the formal scientific debate that effectively concluded Blue Book had been deficient as a science program. The conclusion is documented in the Wikipedia entry on Sagan, sourced to the AAAS proceedings and to Sagan’s own writing. Sagan rejected the extraterrestrial hypothesis on the available evidence while arguing the topic was worth disciplined inquiry. Syracuse University’s astronomy faculty has, by contrast, published no peer-reviewed UAP work that CNY Signal could verify in standard academic indexes as of publication. The active U.S. academic program is the Galileo Project at Harvard, led by Avi Loeb, founded in 2021.

Onondaga County’s Department of Emergency Communications publishes a 2024 Annual Report with aggregate 911 categories but does not break out a UAP or unidentified aircraft category. The most concentrated 2024 cluster in New York State, per the Wikipedia entry on the 2024 United States drone sightings, was the November to December wave of unidentified drone reports beginning in New Jersey and spreading north; CNY Signal could find no Onondaga County-specific surge tied to that wave in publicly indexed local 911 summaries.

What the May 8, 2026 release actually contains

The 162 files now hosted at war.gov/UFO span eight decades of federal UAP material. The Pentagon’s release statement describes the package as including military reports, witness interviews, pilot accounts, government memos, photos, and videos. NPR and NBC News, both of which covered the launch on the day of release, reported that the highest-profile space-program inclusions are Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 archival imagery depicting unidentified objects on the lunar horizon during the 1969 and 1972 missions. CNY Signal has not independently reviewed the full file content of the 162-document release.

The release does not, as of publication of this article, contain a publicly indexed New York-specific case file beyond what was already in National Archives Project Blue Book holdings. AARO’s separate Official UAP Imagery repository, accessible at aaro.mil, lists cases from the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Western USA, but no public New York-specific case files have been promoted to that repository.

November 14, 2024: AARO’s first full-time director and the cases he says he cannot explain

The most consequential public statement from AARO’s leadership in the current reporting period came on November 14, 2024, the day the FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP was delivered to Congress. Dr. Jon Kosloski, who was named AARO’s first permanent full-time director on August 26, 2024, hosted a media roundtable at the Pentagon to walk reporters through the report. The transcript is posted on the Department of War’s official transcript portal at war.gov/News/Transcripts and was independently captured by The Black Vault and DefenseScoop on the same day.

Two of Kosloski’s statements that day are the most-cited official primary-source quotes in the post-FY2024 AARO record. On the small share of cases AARO has not been able to identify after analysis, Kosloski told reporters: “There are interesting cases that I, with my physics and engineering background and time in the [intelligence community], I do not understand. And I don’t know anybody else who understands them either.” On the size of that residual category, he said the share is “less than 3.5 percent of our cases,” with the rest closing out as balloons, drones, satellites, aircraft, birds, and sensor artifacts. He framed AARO’s analytical focus directly: “we’re focusing on the truly anomalous where we don’t understand the activity.” Both quotes are recorded in DefenseScoop’s coverage by Brandi Vincent, posted November 14, 2024, at defensescoop.com/2024/11/14/uap-aaro-chief-unveils-pentagon-annual-caseload-analysis-new-efforts.

Kosloski also delivered the FY2024 cycle’s headline negative finding on extraterrestrial evidence, repeating in plain terms what AARO has said since its founding: “To date, AARO has discovered no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology.” That sentence appears verbatim in the November 14, 2024 media roundtable transcript and in AARO’s prepared materials. It is the same conclusion reached by the NASA Independent Study Team in its September 14, 2023 final report.

What was new in November 2024, beyond the topline 757-report caseload, was AARO’s disclosure of a deployed sensor system called Gremlin. Kosloski declined to name the deployment site, telling reporters: “It’s currently deployed. We’d rather not say exactly where it is, because we want it to be an unbiased test.” Gremlin is described in AARO materials as a portable suite combining radar, electro-optical, infrared, and radio frequency sensors designed to characterize UAP at locations where reports cluster. AARO’s portfolio of public case files at aaro.mil/UAP-Cases continues to lead with imagery from Middle East MQ-9 operations, with no public Central or Upstate New York case file promoted to that repository as of publication.

For Central New York, the operative line from Kosloski on November 14 is the modest one: the office can resolve almost everything, the residual is small, and the residual is what AARO and Congress are paying attention to. Hancock Field’s MQ-9 fleet, AARO’s stated input pipeline for incoming UAP sensor records, sits inside that picture without yet appearing by name in any AARO public case file.

What is not in the federal record

This article relies on what official sources, credentialed local news outlets, and primary archival records actually document. The following items remain unreleased, unverified, or actively disputed at the time of publication:

• The full file content of most of the 162 PURSUE release documents has not been independently reviewed by CNY Signal or any major outlet at the time of publication. The Pentagon release statement summarizes the volume and date range, not the substance of every file.
• No publicly indexed New York-specific case file has yet been added to AARO’s Official UAP Imagery repository.
• The Indian Point July 24, 1984 incident is a documented dispute between a UFO researcher (Imbrogno) and the on-record Power Authority security commander (Branciforte). It is not a confirmed encounter.
• The 5,000-witness figure for the Hudson Valley wave is a researcher tally (Hynek and Imbrogno), not a government count. Imbrogno’s later research credibility came under public scrutiny in subsequent decades; this article does not rely on his account where it is the only source.
• Several NICAP-listed New York Blue Book cases (Homer, Norwich, Lycoming, Willsboro, Franklin Springs, Elmira, Irondequoit) carry case numbers and locations confirmed in the unsolved index but have minimal public file content. The original case files are held in National Archives Record Group 341.
• NUFORC and similar witness databases are self-reported and unverified. A NUFORC New York entry is not the same as a government-investigated case.
• The “Department of War” branding currently used at war.gov is a secondary title authorized by Executive Order 14347 in September 2025. The agency is legally still the U.S. Department of Defense; only Congress can rename a federal department.
• The U.S. government has not, in any of the public material reviewed, presented evidence that any UAP case is of extraterrestrial origin. The NASA Independent Study Team and AARO have both made that explicit.
• AARO’s Historical Record Report Volume 2 had not been publicly released as of publication. AARO Director Kosloski indicated in the November 14, 2024 media roundtable that Volume 2 was among his early priorities, but no public release date was set.
• The November 9, 1965 Hancock Field area witness accounts are documented in NICAP’s published case file and in Bondarchuk’s 1979 chronology citing the Syracuse Herald-Journal. No formal U.S. government UAP case file from that day has been declassified into AARO’s public imagery repository.
• The 174th Attack Wing’s MQ-9 sensor pipeline is one of several streams AARO has cited as a source of incoming UAP records. CNY Signal could not identify any specific public AARO case file tied by name to a Hancock-launched mission.

CNY Signal will update this article as additional verified information is released by official sources, and as the Pentagon’s PURSUE archive is independently reviewed by news organizations.

Sources: U.S. Department of War / Department of Defense PURSUE release statement and portal at war.gov/UFO (May 8, 2026); AARO Historical Record Report Volume I (March 8, 2024); AARO FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP via Office of the Director of National Intelligence (Nov 14, 2024); Dr. Jon Kosloski, AARO Director, Media Roundtable on FY24 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP, war.gov News Transcripts (Nov 14, 2024); DefenseScoop “‘The truly anomalous’: New AARO chief unveils Pentagon’s annual UAP caseload analysis” by Brandi Vincent (Nov 14, 2024); The Black Vault transcript archive of the Nov 14, 2024 AARO media roundtable; NASA UAP Independent Study Team Final Report (Sept 14, 2023); U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book Fact Sheet; National Archives Project Blue Book Record Group 341; NICAP Project Blue Book unidentified case index (nicap.org/bluebook/bluelist.htm); NICAP Nov 9, 1965 Northeast blackout case file (nicap.org/nyne.htm) citing Yurko Bondarchuk, “UFO Sightings, Landings and Abductions” (1979) and Syracuse Herald-Journal contemporaneous coverage; Center for UFO Studies Cherry Creek case file (cufos.org); Lockport AFS history via radomes.org; Project Blue Book Walesville case file; Rome Sentinel “Walesville vs. the flying saucer” by Ron Klopfanstein (June 13, 2018); Wikipedia “174th Attack Wing” entry on Hancock Field lineage, F-94 Starfire 1954 to 1957, F-16 departure March 6, 2010, redesignation Sept 9, 2012; Wikipedia “Hancock Field Air National Guard Base”; Wikipedia “Carl Sagan” on the 1966 Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project Blue Book and the 1969 AAAS symposium; New York Times “Strange Sights Brighten the Night Skies Upstate” by Jeffrey Schmalz (Aug 25, 1984); Westchester-Rockland Daily Item (March 26, 1983); Hynek, Imbrogno and Pratt, “Night Siege” (Ballantine, 1987); Wikipedia “1984 Hudson Valley UFO sightings”; Pentagon UAP Videos public release statement (April 27, 2020); Rome Sentinel “Central New York residents filed 11 UFO reports in 2024” by Will Phillips (April 6, 2025); cnynews.com Fort Edward pilot account (March 21, 2025); Fox News on NUFORC NY 2025 (April 6, 2025); House Oversight Committee public records on July 26, 2023 and November 13, 2024 UAP hearings; Congress.gov S.Amdt 2610 (2023) and S.Amdt 3111 (2025); Onondaga County Department of Emergency Communications 2024 Annual Report; Wikipedia “2024 United States drone sightings”; Executive Order 14347 (September 5, 2025) and contemporaneous Military.com coverage. AARO logo: AARO via Wikimedia Commons (File:Aaro_logo.png), uploaded by user AARO1973 on May 21, 2024, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Hero photo: U.S. Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet launching from USS Nimitz, U.S. Navy / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain). Pentagon UAP video stills used in this article are released by the U.S. Department of Defense as public-domain U.S. Government works.