The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) is a nonprofit clearinghouse for public reports of UFO and UAP sightings, registered in Washington State and founded in 1974 by investigator Robert J. Gribble. It takes reports through an online form and a telephone hotline that, by its own account, police agencies, FAA facilities, weather offices, military installations and 911 dispatch centers routinely pass on to callers who describe something unusual in the sky. Unlike most UFO organizations, it publishes its reports in summary form free of charge.

Peter Davenport, who holds degrees from Stanford and the University of Washington and once directed investigations for MUFON's Washington chapter, has been director since 1994. The center was based in Seattle until 2006, when it moved to a bunker at a former nuclear missile site about 50 miles west of Spokane. Davenport and Christian Stepien, the engineer who has built the website, report archive and reporting software since 1994 and coordinates its investigation team, have funded most of the work themselves, supplemented by donations. Davenport has described himself as a believer but a skeptic, and he has said the 1997 Phoenix Lights were genuine; Arizona officials relied on the center after that event.

Because its archive is public, NUFORC's data have become a standard source for statistical studies of sighting reports. A 2023 Scientific Reports paper co-authored by Sean Kirkpatrick, then director of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, modeled 98,724 NUFORC reports from 2001 to 2020 against light pollution, tree cover, cloud cover, aircraft traffic and military bases, and concluded that people report more phenomena where they have more opportunity to see them. Independent analysts in 2026 used the same records to chart reports against lunar phases, ocean canyons and the colors witnesses describe.

The center's own investigations drew attention in 2026. In May it published an inquiry by investigator James Clarkson into a previously unknown case: a retired Air Force radar technician said the 780th Radar Squadron at Fortuna Air Force Station, North Dakota, tracked an object moving at about 5,000 mph in spring 1967 and that a team from Malmstrom questioned witnesses within days and effectively told them they had seen nothing. The witness ties the event to the 1967 Malmstrom missile shutdowns, though the exact date could not be established. In July, atmospheric chemist John Birks circulated a preprint analyzing 508 orb reports to NUFORC and proposing that some orbs are a dusty plasma formed from meteoric debris, a hypothesis the Good Trouble Show said it would challenge.

In August 2026 NUFORC took in its 200,000th sighting report, a milestone the center described as five decades of first-hand testimony made available to the public. The total counts witness accounts rather than confirmed anomalies, and many reports have ordinary explanations. Even so, the center's hotline and open archive remain one of the most widely used public records of UAP sightings in the United States.