The National Archives of Australia, sometimes called the Australian National Archives, is the Commonwealth agency that preserves federal government records and makes them available to the public. It grew out of the Commonwealth National Library, which appointed its first archives officer in 1944. The Commonwealth Archives Office became a separate body in 1961, was renamed Australian Archives in 1975 and took its present name in 1998. The Archives Act 1983 governs it, and most Commonwealth records become open to the public once they are 20 years old. Its national office is in Canberra, with reading rooms in Darwin and each state capital, and Simon Froude has been Director-General since 2022.

The archives hold the files in which Australian agencies recorded what officials called unusual aerial sightings. Between 2003 and 2008 a volunteer search compiled by the researcher Keith Basterfield used the Archives and Freedom of Information acts to locate records of 151 such files. They came from agencies including the Department of Air and the Royal Australian Air Force, the army and navy, the Department of Supply, the Department of Civil Aviation, the security service ASIO, the CSIRO and the Joint Intelligence Organisation. Basterfield noted that the online RecordSearch catalogue then indexed only about a tenth of the collection, and that files marked "not yet examined" had to return to their originating agencies for clearance, which in some cases took more than a year.

When the air force closed its UFO files in the 1990s, they were transferred to the archives, and ABC News reported in 2024 that hundreds had been digitised and put online. Scheduled openings also bring material to light. In 2012 a release under the archives' 30-year rule included reports of two RAAF Mirage fighters placed on the second-highest level of alert over unidentified radar contacts in New South Wales, along with photographs of lights seen over Bendigo in 1983.

The best-known UFO record in its custody is the Joint Intelligence Organisation file containing the 1971 Harry Turner Memo, in which the physicist Harry Turner argued that American agencies had publicly discouraged interest in the subject while studying it seriously. Originally classified secret, the file was released in 2008 after a request by Basterfield. At a Capitol press conference on 9 June 2026, David Grusch called it a "formally classified secret assessment" placed in the archives "a couple years ago" and urged the public to read pages 7 through 16. Three days later a copy was reissued in PURSUE UFO Files Release 03, and Grusch returned to it on The Joe Rogan Experience at the end of September.

Through these holdings the archives preserve the main documentary record of how Australian defence, scientific and civil agencies handled UFO reports from the early 1950s to the 1990s, including the internal debate over whether the subject deserved any scientific study at all.