How The Alien Archives Evaluates Extraordinary Claims

Most reports of extraordinary things are ordinary things seen under extraordinary circumstances. The work of an archive is to tell the difference, in public, with the reasoning visible. These are the checks the research desk applies.

Provenance

The first question is always: where did this come from? A piece of footage that arrives with no source, or that has passed through several unnamed hands before reaching the archive, carries less weight than one whose origin can be named. The same applies to a written claim: a statement taken from a named witness, in a known place, on a known date, is a different kind of evidence than a story that has circulated unnamed for years.

Provenance does not establish that a report is accurate. It establishes that the report can be examined at all.

Physics

The second question is whether what is described is physically possible as shown. Footage of an object that changes direction instantly, in ways no known craft can, raises the question of whether it is a craft. That is not a verdict that it is fake; it is a flag that the simpler explanation — a small, light, nearby object, or a sensor artifact, or a reflection — needs to be ruled out first. The archive favors the explanation that requires the fewest unsupported assumptions.

Edges

For footage, the edges tell a great deal. Real objects moving through real air interact with their surroundings: they occlude and are occluded, they cast and receive light, their edges behave consistently with distance. Composited or synthetic objects often fail at the edges, where one layer meets another. The edge check is not infallible, but it is where a great deal of fabrication is visible.

Corroboration

A single observation is a single observation. Two independent observations — from different witnesses who did not confer, from different instruments, from different locations — are something else. The 1952 Washington, D.C. incidents and the JAL 1628 case sit in the record partly because they combined radar and visual contact. The archive weights corroboration heavily, and is cautious about single-source cases regardless of how vivid they are.

Provenance of the story itself

Beyond the provenance of the report, there is the history of the story. Has it grown over time? Were details added years after the event? Did the witness first tell it one way and later another? The Roswell record is the clearest example: the documented 1947 debris recovery and the alien-recovery account that developed decades later are different events in the telling, and the archive keeps them apart.

What this is for

These checks do not exist to dismiss reports. They exist to make the archive a record that can be trusted, by showing the reasoning behind what is kept and how it is described. A report that survives all five is rare and valuable. A report that does not survive them is still a report — it is just described as one, rather than as something more.

For the standards applied to published research, see Editorial Standards and Sources & Methodology. For the practical reader's guide, see The Alien Archives Guide to Reading a UFO Case File.