The ODNI's 2021 assessment covered 144 military reports from 2004–2021. Two years later the cumulative government case count had grown past 800 — hundreds of new reports per year once a real channel existed.
Reporting moved from hotlines and local news to official channels — pilots now file through a system Congress required — so the public hears less while the government logs more.
Most new cases resolve prosaically: balloons, drones, clutter, Starlink. A minority — the same stubborn residue as every era — stays unexplained.
Sightings aren't gone. They were rerouted, and the unexplained residue persists at roughly its historical rate.
The feeling that UFOs “stopped” is a media artifact. When the Navy built a real reporting channel and Congress required annual accounting, the reports stopped flowing through your local news and started flowing through AARO — which now receives them at a rate the hotline era never saw.
The composition of the answers is the story. Give trained observers a stigma-free channel and most mysteries die quickly: weather balloons, hobby drones, satellite trains, sensor ghosts. That is the system working. The residue that survives full investigation — a few percent, era after era, from Blue Book to GEIPAN to AARO — is the part this site exists to cover.
So the honest version of the question isn't “where did the sightings go?” It's “why does the residue never quite reach zero?” That question has survived every reporting system ever built for it. The file stays open.
AP PRESS