NRC FOIA Response 2017-0368 Regarding UFO Allegations

This document is a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) response from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to John Greenewald, Jr., dated March 23, 2017. The request sought all documents collected by the NRC regarding UFOs from 1975 to the date of the request. The response includes several internal NRC files related to specific allegations of UAP sightings reported to the agency. The primary case file, RIV-2010-A-0101, concerns a report from a former security officer at the Cooper Nuclear Station in Nebraska. The witness alleged that between 1986 and 1989, a triangular-shaped unidentified flying object with rotating lights hovered over the protected area of the nuclear facility. The witness claimed that multiple security officers observed the craft, but the incident was never formally reported to the NRC. Upon receiving this allegation in 2010, the NRC conducted a search of the facility's corrective action program records from 1986 to 1989 but found no entries matching the description. The NRC concluded that the report concerned a past event with no impact on current safety or security and took no further action, referring the information to the licensee for their awareness. The document also contains records of two other unrelated allegations: RIV-1998-A-0207, involving an individual who expressed concerns about low-level radiation and UFOs in California, and RIV-1997-A-0018, involving a letter alleging that the Department of Defense had been flying nuclear-powered craft in New Mexico for over 50 years, which the Air Force referred to as UFOs. In both of these cases, the NRC determined that the issues fell outside of its regulatory jurisdiction and closed the files without further investigation. The collection provides insight into how the NRC processes and documents reports of anomalous phenomena, typically categorizing them as non-safety-related or outside of their regulatory scope.