- AARO is the U.S. Department of Defense’s office tasked to investigate UAP, aka UFOs. UAP stands for “unidentified aerial phenomena.” This office, active since 2022, now releases annual reports on its findings. AARO focuses on reports of “sightings” from military personnel, for example from aircraft pilots.
- AARO released its latest unclassified public version of a UAP report on November 14, 2024. The report contains 757 new cases (sightings). As is usual, most cases were found to have commonplace explanations.
- The report also notes 21 unexplained cases. It calls them “truly anomalous.” So far, AARO has been unable to explain these 21 cases.
Latest annual Pentagon UAP report released
Later today (November 19, 2024), the Senate Armed Services Committee, led by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, will hold another hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), known to most of us as UFOs.
The first part of the hearing will be closed (classified), followed by the open (public) hearing. The public portion of the hearing starts at 4:30 p.m. EST. You can watch LIVE here or here.
The hearing will center on the latest annual report – issued November 14, 2024 – by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The report covers the past year’s findings by the DoD’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). It covers a total of 757 new cases submitted to AARO since last year’s report. While the report repeats earlier statements that no connection to “extraterrestrials” has yet been found, it does note that at least 21 of the cases are unexplained.
These cases are said in the report to be “true anomalies.” AARO director Jon Kosloski also provided comments to reports during an off-camera media roundtable after the the DoD announced the release of the report. The DoD issued a press release on November 14, 2024, about the latest annual report. It noted that:
The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office is leading DoD’s efforts, in coordination with ODNI and other government agencies, to document, analyze and when possible, resolve UAP reports using a rigorous scientific framework and a data-driven approach.
The Senate hearing on November 19 will focus on testimony from Kosloski as well as recent incursions of probable drones/UAS (unmanned aerial systems) over Langley Air Force Base. Known drone incursions over military bases has been another problematic issue over the past few years, despite a lack of media coverage about the issue.
Also read a good summary from DefenseScoop
757 new cases in new UAP report
The report contains a total of 757 new cases that were reported to AARO since May 1 of last year. The report stated:
This report covers unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) reports from May 1, 2023, to June 1, 2024, and all UAP reports from any previous time periods that were not included in an earlier report. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) received 757 UAP reports during this period; 485 of these reports featured UAP incidents that occurred during the reporting period. The remaining 272 reports featured UAP incidents that occurred between 2021 and 2022 but were not reported to AARO until this reporting period and consequently were not included in previous annual UAP reports.
Most cases resolved
Many of those cases have been resolved, fitting with many various earlier studies that have shown that the majority of cases can be explained as prosaic. The report said:
AARO resolved 118 cases during the reporting period, all of which resolved to prosaic objects such as various types of balloons, birds and unmanned aerial systems (UAS). As of May 31, 2024, AARO has an additional 174 cases queued for closure, pending a final review and Director’s approval. As of the publishing date of this report, all 174 cases have been finalized as resolved to prosaic objects including balloons, birds, UAS, satellites and aircraft. Many other cases remain unresolved and AARO continues collection and analysis on that body of cases. It is important to underscore that, to date, AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology.
Air and space domains
708 of the reported incidents occurred in the air domain. And interestingly, 49 of the cases are from the space domain. Those were from estimated altitudes of 62 miles (100 km) or higher. As the report said:
AARO notes that none of the space domain reports originated from space-based sensors or assets; rather, all of these reports originated from military or commercial pilots or ground observers who reported UAP located at altitudes estimated at 100 kilometers or higher, consistent with U.S. Space Command’s (USSPACECOM) astrographic area of responsibility.
No known connections to adversaries
A popular theory is that most UAP reports are the result of adversarial nations spying with drones or balloons. While some incidents do indeed involve drones and balloons in general, the report also noted that to date, none of the resolved UAP cases have been attributed to foreign adversarial activities. It said:
None of these resolved cases substantiated advanced foreign adversarial capabilities or breakthrough aerospace technologies. AARO will provide immediate notification to Congress should AARO identify that any cases indicate or involve a breakthrough foreign adversarial aerospace capability.
21 ‘truly anomalous’ cases
AARO’s mandate is to focus on cases that remain anomalous after investigation. When other cases are resolved as commonplace, they are handed off to other agencies. As Kosloski told DefenseScoop on November 14:
So those investigations are conducted by somebody else, and we’re focusing on the truly anomalous where we don’t understand the activity.
Out of 757 new cases, AARO deemed 21 of them to be significant enough for more detailed study. These include three incidents where pilots reported being “trailed or shadowed” by UAP. The report said:
AARO is working closely with its IC (intelligence community) and S&T (science and technology) partners to understand and attribute the 21 cases received this reporting period that merit further analysis based on reported anomalous characteristics and/or behaviors.
While none of the resolved cases were found to involve breakthrough technologies, what about the still-unresolved ones? AARO doesn’t know yet. Kosloski said:
That’s exactly right. So we don’t fully understand the phenomenon enough to say whether or not it’s a breakthrough technology or not. So it’s a very small percentage of our overall cases that after the initial analysis still have the anomalous characteristics that one could attribute breakthrough technologies to. It’s less than 3.5% of our cases. And we’re still studying those with our IC and S&T partners, trying to understand what technologies could be used to provide those characteristics.
Not all drones and UAS
Kosloski also noted that there are several particularly interesting cases that AARO is still working on. These are presumably among the 21 cases previously mentioned. He also stated that these UAP incidents are not all just drones and UAS:
It’s definitely not all just drones and UAS. So we have several particularly interesting cases. We’re working on within the office, working with our partners to downgrade several of those cases, so we can talk about them publicly. But there are interesting cases that I, with my physics and engineering background and time in the IC, I do not understand. And I don’t know anybody else who understands them either. Until we get the information approved for release, I’d rather not say where those sightings were, but definitely interesting sightings.
Declassification workshop
For the public, one of the primary frustrations has been the over-classification of UAP information. Indeed, even when documents are released through FOIA, they are still largely blacked out. Kosloski said that AARO is working to improve that:
We’re going to be hosting a declassification workshop, so we can make sure we’re implementing best practices from across the DOD and the IC. All of that takes more time than I think the public would like for it to take, but AARO is working on it. We recognize that the types of cases that I was just talking about are, from my perspective, true anomalies.
And we’re going to need significant scientific rigor to address those. And yes, the U.S. government has a lot of nice scientists, little bias there, but we’re going to need the help of academia and the public to address some of these so we need to build that more transparent partnership.
GREMLIN surveillance system
AARO is also working on a new system of deployable advanced sensors called GREMLIN. The purpose is to try to track UAP activity in known hotspots. GREMLIN includes 2D and 3D radars, long-range electro-optical/infrared sensors, GPS, satellite communications, aircraft tracking systems and radio frequency spectrum monitoring.
It was first tested in March 2024 and is now deployed.
Bottom line: The DoD just released its new annual report on UAP, known to most of us as UFOs. The Pentagon UAP report covers 757 new cases, with 21 of them unexplained so far.
Source: Fiscal Year 2024 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena
Via U.S. Department of Defense (press release)
Via U.S. Department of Defense (Media Roundtable Transcript)
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