DOD Investigates Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena > US Department of Defense > Defense Department News

The mission of the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office is to minimize technological and intelligence surprise by detecting, identifying, and mitigating unidentified anomalous phenomena in the vicinity of national security areas, in coordination with the intelligence community.

UAP is any object in the air, sea or space that defies scientific explanation.

Today, Jon Kosloski, the AARO director discussed financial year 2024 consolidated annual report on UAPwhich covers the period May 1, 2023 to June 1, 2024. That report was briefed to congressional staff earlier this week.

This report covers the UAP from May 1, 2023 to June 1, 2024 and all UAP reports from earlier time periods that were not included in a previous report. AARO received 757 UAP reports during this period, 485 of these reports contained UAP incidents that occurred during the reporting period.

The remaining 272 reports contained UAP incidents that occurred between 2021 and 2022 but were not reported to AARO prior to this reporting period and were therefore not included in previous annual UAP reports.

“AARO has successfully resolved hundreds of cases in its holdings involving common items such as balloons, birds, drones, satellites and aircraft,” Kosloski said.

“Only a very small percentage of reports to AARO are potentially anomalous, but these are the cases that require significant time, resources and focused scientific investigation by AARO and its partners,” Kosloski said.

“It is also important to emphasize that to date AARO has not discovered any verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology. None of the cases that AARO has solved (have) pointed to advanced capabilities or cutting-edge technologies,” pointed out he.

Over 900 reports lack sufficient scientific data for analysis and are kept in an active archive. Those cases may be reopened and resolved if additional information emerges to support the analysis, he said.

AARO continues to see a density of UAP reports near US military assets and sensors. However, that density has been reduced somewhat by an increase in commercial pilot reporting in the continental United States, he said.

There has been an education campaign to reduce reporting stigma and to help pilots identify explained objects to reduce false positive sightings, he added.

“Unidentified objects in any domain pose potential threats to safety and security. Reports of UAP, especially near national security sites, must be taken seriously and investigated with scientific rigor by the US government,” he said.

AARO is working to expand UAP reporting to more of the interagency agencies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration, Kosloski said.

Also in the near term, AARO hopes to work with allies and the U.S. public on UAP engagement and expand the scope of its work to include non-national security sites in the United States, he said.

Another desire of AARO is to speed up the declassification process of UAP reports faster. As such, more declassification experts are employed.

Meanwhile, AARO continues to review the U.S. historical record regarding the UAP and will publish a second volume of its congressionally directed historical record report. “We welcome any former or current government civilian, contractor or military service member with relevant information to contact us at www.aaro.milhe said.

AARO has taken meaningful steps to improve data collection and storage, strengthen sensor development, effectively triage UAP reports and reduce the stigma of reporting a UAP incident, he said.

“In the coming year, AARO will prioritize building partnerships, promoting increased transparency and scaling up the work of the office,” Kosloski said.

“For every UAP report, operational or historical, AARO will follow the science and data wherever they lead, and we are committed to sharing as much information as possible at the unclassified level to inform the public of our activities and findings,” he said.

A little background on the UAP naming convention: In 1952, the Air Force used the term Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFO, which most people still use outside of government agencies.

In 2022, UAP accounted for unidentified aerial phenomena. However, this term did not include underwater objects, so the new term with the same abbreviation now stands for unidentified anomalous phenomena.