The administered sky: instrument, editor, and witness in eight decades of NUFORC UFO reports

Archives of citizen UFO reports are routinely read as records of what people saw. This study instead treats them as records of what three agents contributed to a single document. Analysing 87,594 reports filed with the National UFO Reporting Centre from U.S. locations between 1947 and 2022, we distinguish the categorical vocabulary supplied by the reporting instrument, the diagnostic vocabulary supplied by archive editors, and the descriptive vocabulary supplied by witnesses. The compositional shift in reported shapes is modest (bias-corrected Cramer’s V = 0.092), with only the disk category showing sustained change. Ninety-four percent of reports were filed through a single online form with a fixed shape menu, and shape distributions vary systematically across three intake regimes. Separating editorial annotation from witness prose overturns a widely cited textual finding: of 1,016 Starlink mentions, 989 are editorial annotations and only 27 come from witnesses. Starlink appears almost simultaneously across 48 states, whereas the witness term drone spreads gradually across 41 states over a decade. Shape trends also move in lockstep across all four census regions. The categorical record is therefore better understood as administered rather than folk, revealing a division of labour between witnesses who describe and institutions that identify.