AARO and the Pentagon UAP Office: Deep Dive

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The AARO Pentagon UAP office, formally the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, is the Department of Defense’s central body for investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena. Established on July 15, 2022, AARO sits within the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security and draws on reports from every U.S. military service, the intelligence community, and increasingly the public. Over its first three years, the office has been led by two directors, released a high-profile historical review, and catalogued hundreds of new sightings. It has also become one of the most contested offices in the Pentagon.

The Pentagon, Arlington VA (38.87, -77.05)

TL;DR: AARO was stood up in 2022 to consolidate fragmented UAP investigation efforts across the U.S. military and intelligence community. Its first director, Sean Kirkpatrick, concluded in a 2024 historical review that the office found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial activity, a finding critics have called premature and error-ridden. Current director Jon Kosloski inherited roughly 1,600 reported cases and a report queue that grows faster than it can be resolved. Sources linked below.

Timeline

November 23, 2021 Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks signed a memorandum establishing the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), a short-lived predecessor to AARO.

December 27, 2021 Congress passed the FY22 National Defense Authorization Act, which directed DoD to establish a permanent cross-domain UAP office with broader authority than AOIMSG.

July 15, 2022 Deputy Secretary Hicks and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie formally announced AARO’s establishment, replacing AOIMSG and expanding its scope to include underwater and transmedium objects.

December 1, 2023 Sean Kirkpatrick, AARO’s first director, departed the role after roughly 17 months. DefenseScoop reported his successor would be named at a later date.

March 8, 2024 AARO released the “Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Volume I”, a historical review covering 1945 to 2023.

August 26, 2024 Dr. Jon T. Kosloski was named the second director of AARO. Kosloski came from the National Security Agency’s Research Directorate.

November 14, 2024 AARO submitted its FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP to Congress, describing 757 new cases received between May 1, 2023 and June 1, 2024.

November 19, 2024 Director Kosloski testified in a public hearing before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, his first public appearance in the role.

How the AARO Pentagon UAP Office Came to Be

The AARO Pentagon UAP office did not appear out of nothing. It replaced a short-lived predecessor, AOIMSG, which itself replaced a Navy-led task force called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF). Before that, the Department of Defense ran the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) between 2007 and 2012, funded with about $22 million in appropriations secured by then-Senator Harry Reid. According to The New York Times, AATIP’s existence was publicly disclosed in December 2017.

The reason for the churn was structural. Each predecessor office either had a narrow service focus, a short statutory life, or both. A 2021 Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessment found that reporting on UAP was inconsistent across services and that no single body had responsibility for cross-domain analysis. Congress responded by mandating, through the FY22 NDAA, a permanent office with the authority to receive reports from any part of the department, the intelligence community, and other federal agencies.

AARO’s mandate, as described by the Department of Defense, is to detect, identify, and attribute objects of interest in, on, or near military installations, operating areas, training areas, special use airspace, and other areas of interest. Its budget is classified, though it is part of the larger Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.

Sean Kirkpatrick’s Tenure, 2022 to 2023

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, a physicist with a background in intelligence and missile defense, served as AARO’s first director from July 2022 to December 2023. Before his appointment, he had been chief scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center. His statement for the record at the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities hearing on April 19, 2023 outlined AARO’s early findings and investigative approach.

During his tenure, Kirkpatrick repeatedly told Congress that AARO had found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial activity, recovered craft, or reverse-engineering programs. In a widely discussed Politico Magazine exit interview published January 19, 2024, he said that of the approximately 1,200 cases AARO had reviewed by that point, only a small fraction remained genuinely anomalous after analysis, and that those were more often cases of insufficient data than evidence of non-human origin.

Kirkpatrick left AARO on December 1, 2023. He later joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory as chief technology officer. His successor was not announced for nearly nine months, during which Timothy Phillips served as acting AARO director.

The Historical Record Report

On March 8, 2024, AARO released Volume I of its Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP. The report was mandated by Section 1683 of the FY23 NDAA, which required AARO to compile a historical record covering 1945 to the present and deliver it to Congress and the public.

Volume I covers 1945 through 2023. Its central conclusion, stated on page one, is that AARO found no verifiable evidence that the U.S. government or private companies had ever possessed non-human technology or biological material, or that any classified reverse-engineering program had existed. The report describes interviews with roughly 30 people who claimed firsthand knowledge of such programs, and concludes that most claims traced back to a small number of witnesses whose assertions were not corroborated by documents or independent witnesses.

The report also examined one physical sample that had been publicly claimed to be of non-human origin, a magnesium-zinc-bismuth alloy often associated with the researcher Jacques Vallée. Laboratory analysis reported in Volume I concluded the sample’s composition was consistent with terrestrial industrial processes.

Volume II, which will cover events from 2024 onward, has not been released as of this article’s publication. Under the current statutory timeline it is due to Congress before the end of fiscal year 2026.

Jon Kosloski Takes Over

Dr. Jon T. Kosloski was named AARO’s second director on August 26, 2024. Kosloski holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University and came to AARO from the National Security Agency’s Research Directorate, where he worked on quantum optics and cryptographic mathematics. His statement for the record before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities on November 19, 2024 was his first public appearance in the role.

In that testimony, Kosloski said that since his arrival he had reviewed roughly 1,600 cases and that AARO was actively working to close about 300 of them. He also said AARO had not found evidence of extraterrestrial activity but emphasized that the office was continuing to investigate, that many cases remained open, and that the office would publish physics-based analyses of the most unusual cases. CBS News reported that Kosloski described one case involving an object that appeared to perform maneuvers that did not match any known aircraft.

The FY2024 Annual Report: 757 New Cases

AARO submitted its FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP to Congress on November 14, 2024, five days before the Senate hearing. The report covered the period from May 1, 2023 to June 1, 2024 and described 757 new cases received during that window. Of those 757 new cases, AARO said 485 were reported within the period itself and 272 were pre-existing cases received from other sources.

According to the report, the majority of resolved cases were attributed to balloons, birds, and unmanned aerial systems. A smaller fraction were attributed to satellites, aircraft, and optical phenomena. A significant subset, which the report describes as “cases of interest,” remain open pending additional data. DefenseScoop’s coverage noted that AARO’s total case load since mid-2022 had grown to roughly 1,800.

The report was released the same week as reports of repeated drone incursions over Langley Air Force Base, which Kosloski addressed briefly in his Senate testimony by saying the incursions were under active investigation.

The full April 19, 2023 Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities hearing, in which Sean Kirkpatrick delivered AARO’s first major public update on the office’s mission and early findings.

Opposing Perspectives

Critics Call the Historical Record Report Error-Ridden

The March 2024 Historical Record Report drew sharp criticism from researchers and lawmakers who had expected a more expansive review. Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, called it in a column in The Hill “the most error-ridden report on any subject I have ever read from the U.S. government.” Mellon and others pointed to dates, names, and event descriptions in the report that did not match the underlying primary documents. Liberation Times reported that Senator Marco Rubio, then-vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, corroborated that the Intelligence Community Inspector General had found whistleblower David Grusch’s claims “credible and urgent,” a finding the report did not address in detail.

Defenders of AARO counter that Volume I was limited by statute to publicly releasable material and that a classified annex contained additional analysis. Kirkpatrick himself, after departing AARO, said in his Politico exit interview that witnesses making extraordinary claims had repeatedly declined to produce documents or referrals to other witnesses when asked.

The Prosaic-Explanations Case

Skeptical analysts argue that the case pattern AARO has reported is consistent with a mundane-origin hypothesis. Metabunk’s Mick West, who has written detailed analyses of Navy-released UAP video, has argued that the public evidence so far, including the Gimbal, Go Fast, and FLIR1 videos that became famous in 2017, is better explained by sensor artifacts, optical illusions, and parallax effects than by exotic craft. West points to AARO’s finding that the majority of resolved cases are attributable to known categories, balloons, UAS, and birds, as consistent with a broader pattern in which exotic explanations have consistently failed to survive careful investigation. AARO’s FY2024 report notes that it continues to improve sensor tasking and data-sharing arrangements with the Federal Aviation Administration and NASA precisely to reduce the population of “insufficient data” cases that critics on both sides find unsatisfying.

Director Jon Kosloski’s November 19, 2024 open testimony before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, his first public appearance as AARO director.

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