Regional intelligence is collected, classified, encrypted, sent out, decrypted, and distributed to various military commands. Sort of like a news service. So the General gets a stack of these decrypted messages to skim through with his coffee like a morning newspaper. Faulkner, as an intel officer, might well have access to those or even have the job of reading through them. Most of them are going to be... obscure. A report of an anomaly might well be in them.
A friend of my father did this sort of thing in Vietnam. Maybe Faulkner's first encounter wasn't because of an obscure report, but rather because of things that didn't add up. One report says A, another says B, a third says C, and when she pokes around a little, the Spooks say MYOB.
