In production

Insufficient Data

Feature documentary • About 88 minutes • In production

12,618 sightings. 22 years. One box marked “Insufficient Data”.

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Insufficient Data poster

About Insufficient Data

Between 1947 and 1969 the United States Air Force logged 12,618 reports of unidentified aerial phenomena on a standard printed form, ATIC Form 329, and sorted them into categories: Venus. Jupiter. Meteor. Weather balloon. Insufficient Data. Of those case files, 10,764 survive in public digital archives.

Insufficient Data reads all of them. Across five acts the film follows Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer the Air Force hired to explain the sightings away, as two decades of case files slowly turn their own sceptic into their most awkward witness.

What the archive reveals is not a cover-up but something stranger: an intake process. Careful “Unresolved” notes from local field investigators arrive at headquarters and come back out flattened into a neat box marked Venus. This is a film about what happens to wonder when it meets a filing system.