CRIDOVNI, the Comisión Receptora e Investigadora de Denuncias de Objetos Voladores No Identificados (Commission for the Reception and Investigation of Reports of Unidentified Flying Objects), is the Uruguayan Air Force's standing body for UFO reports. Montevideo Portal has described it as created in 1979 to complement air traffic control after repeated sighting reports around Uruguay, and a 2010 report by the same outlet traced its origins to a run of reports in the mid-1970s. Colonel Ariel Sánchez led it by 2010 and, now retired, remained its director in 2026.

The commission works without a budget of its own. Speaking at the first International Congress on Research of Aerospace and Terrestrial Phenomena, held in November 2010 at the Air Force Club in Montevideo, Lieutenant Daniel Silvera described how it borrows the Air Force's tools instead. Those include radar, national aeronautical and meteorological data, a photo laboratory for spotting manipulated images and materials testing, sometimes with help from the University of the Republic. The Municipal Planetarium supplies astronomical data, and satellite tracking helps rule out objects in orbit. Each report is taken through a fixed set of questions, and Silvera said no case is dismissed in advance.

By then the commission had received 2,200 reports, 1,204 of which warranted investigation. About 70 percent were clarified and closed, 27 percent were held awaiting new data, and roughly 3 percent, some 40 cases, remained unresolved. Most reports came with no evidence at all, and only 11 percent of witnesses were pilots, meteorologists or air traffic controllers. Silvera called two cases involving the Air Force itself the country's most important; in both, aircraft made visual contact with luminous spheres they could not intercept. The commission states its findings as probabilities. When photos taken at a July 2010 celebration for the national football team outside the Palacio Legislativo showed an unidentified shape, it judged the images authentic but put the chance of a conventional object, such as plastic, paper or cloth carried on updrafts, at 97 percent.

Its foreign ties deepened in 2025. By AARO's account, CRIDOVNI was the only South American organization registered for the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office's private UAP workshop that August, where it was invited to present its work, and records later released to The Black Vault show AARO asking about its relationship with the Air Force and its scientific and governmental partners. In February 2026 Sánchez told Montevideo Portal that a cooperation agreement with the United States was expected to be signed in March. He said the Americans had offered hardware and software, and that Uruguay sought logistical support rather than money. After further meetings in July, which included a presentation by AARO director Jon Kosloski, the Air Force said the two sides had discussed methods of case analysis, procedures for ruling out conventional phenomena and future technological tools. The records released in September did not show a signed agreement.

For more than four decades CRIDOVNI has run on borrowed Air Force resources, grading each report by the probability of a conventional cause. Those decades of casework were what AARO said it wanted to learn from when it began working with the commission.