{"it":{"id":"GOV-AARO","sub":"Public report","name":"AARO Historical Record Report, Vol. I","place":"All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia, USA","lat":38.871,"lon":-77.056,"date":"Released 8 March 2024","rep":"AARO reviewed records back to 1945.","off":"It found no evidence that any US government investigation had confirmed a UAP sighting as extraterrestrial technology, and no empirical evidence for claims of reverse-engineered alien craft.","src":[{"t":"AARO: Report on the Historical Record, Vol. I (PDF; site blocks automated checks)","u":"https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/DOPSR-CLEARED-508-COMPLIANT-HRRV1-08-FEB-2024-FINAL.PDF"},{"t":"Wikipedia: All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-domain_Anomaly_Resolution_Office"},{"t":"AARO 2024: Historical Record Report, Volume 1 (PDF)","u":"https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/DOPSR-2024-0263-AARO-HISTORICAL-RECORD-REPORT-VOLUME-1-2024.PDF"},{"t":"ODNI 2021: Preliminary Assessment, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (PDF)","u":"https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf"}],"tags":["Report","Military","Archive","USA"],"kind":"gov","sum":"In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton asked his staff to find out about Roswell. \"If the U.S. Air Force did recover alien bodies,\" he said, \"they didn't tell me about it.\" On 8 March 2024, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office gave its own answer, at much greater length.\n\nIts Historical Record Report, Volume I, reviewed every official US investigation of UAP since 1945. The office searched classified and unclassified archives and conducted about 30 interviews. The record runs from Project Blue Book, which logged 12,618 sightings from 1947 to 1969 and left 701 unidentified, to the Pentagon programmes of the years after 2009.\n\nThe claims it was testing were specific: that the government holds recovered craft, and bodies, and has been reverse-engineering them in secret. The office found no empirical evidence that any of this happened. Some alleged programmes turned out to be real but ordinary classified work, misread. One, Kona Blue, was a proposal to the Department of Homeland Security that was never approved or funded.\n\nThe report traces the story to circular reporting: a small group of believers repeating each other's accounts, amplified online and in the press. Critics answer that the office never saw the most secret programmes, so finding nothing proves nothing.\n\nA second volume was due to cover interviews to April 2024. The open question has shifted, from whether craft were recovered to whether anyone outside the deepest secrecy could ever check.","qs":["AARO found no evidence behind the crash-retrieval claims, and critics say it never saw the programmes that matter most. What evidence would settle it, and who could be trusted to see it?","AARO said many claims came from a small circle repeating each other. Is that a fair diagnosis, or a convenient way to dismiss witnesses?","Project Blue Book left 701 sightings unidentified. Is an unsolved case evidence of anything, or just a case that ran out of data?"],"yt":"Compare AARO's account of each program with the program's own records in this section.","rel":["REC-HRG2023","REC-KONA","REC-EST1948"],"hook":"Project Blue Book logged 12,618 sightings and left 701 unidentified. AARO found no evidence of recovered craft","why":"It is the US government's fullest answer to the crash-retrieval story, and it says that story rests on misread secret projects and repetition, not on hidden craft."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"GOV-AARO","src":[{"id":null,"t":"All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume I, February 2024 (released 8 March 2024).","u":"https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/DOPSR-CLEARED-508-COMPLIANT-HRRV1-08-FEB-2024-FINAL.PDF"},{"id":null,"t":"Department of Defense / AARO, Fiscal Year 2024 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, November 2024.","u":"https://media.defense.gov/2024/Nov/14/2003583603/-1/-1/0/FY24-CONSOLIDATED-ANNUAL-REPORT-ON-UAP-508.PDF"},{"id":null,"t":"ODNI and Department of Defense, Fiscal Year 2023 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, October 2023.","u":"https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/FY2023-Consolidated-Annual-Report-UAP-Oct2023.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"US House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, hearing “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency,” 26 July 2023 (testimony of David Grusch, Ryan Graves, David Fravor).","u":"https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-118hhrg53022/html/CHRG-118hhrg53022.htm"},{"id":null,"t":"US House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, joint hearing “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” 13 November 2024, Serial No. 118-135.","u":"https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-118hhrg57440/html/CHRG-118hhrg57440.htm"},{"id":null,"t":"Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, January 2023.","u":"https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Unclassified-2022-Annual-Report-UAP.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (used only for directors’ dates).","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-domain_Anomaly_Resolution_Office"}],"sum":"The strangest document in the Pentagon's official history of UFOs is a real government proposal to capture and take apart a spacecraft from another world. It was called KONA BLUE. Its backers submitted it to the Department of Homeland Security as a \"Prospective Special Access Program,\" a category reserved for especially restricted secret work, and its stated aim was to \"reverse-engineer any recovered off-world spacecraft that they hoped to acquire.\" It gained enough early traction that a special access programme was formally requested. Then DHS leadership rejected it \"for lacking merit,\" and its supporters, the Pentagon says, \"never provided empirical evidence to support their claims.\" The only crash-retrieval programme the government could document was one that was never built.\n\nThat finding comes from the Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume I. It is dated February 2024 and was released on 8 March 2024 by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, known as AARO, inside the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. UAP, unidentified anomalous phenomena, is the government's newer name for what most people still call UFOs. The report set out to review every official US investigation of the subject since 1945, and it is the government's fullest answer yet to the story that it has been hiding recovered craft and bodies for decades.\n\nThe office behind it is young. The Department of Defense created AARO in July 2022, replacing earlier efforts that included the Navy-led Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. Congress gave it two jobs: to analyse fresh reports from the military and other sources, and to search the historical record, including the claim that officials had concealed recovered craft. Its first director, the physicist Sean Kirkpatrick, left on 1 December 2023, shortly before the report appeared. Timothy Phillips then served as acting director, and Jon T. Kosloski was named director on 26 August 2024.\n\nThe questions the historical review was asked to test were not vague. Did the government hold recovered craft? Did it hold bodies? Had it been reverse-engineering them in secret? To answer, the office searched classified and unclassified archives and interviewed about 30 people who claimed knowledge of hidden off-world technology or of UAP interfering with American nuclear sites. Among them were five former Air Force members who had served around missile silos at Malmstrom, Ellsworth and Vandenberg.\n\nThe record it traced runs a long way back. Project Blue Book, which ran from 1947 to 1969, logged 12,618 sightings and left 701 of them unidentified. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton asked his own staff to find out about Roswell. \"If the U.S. Air Force did recover alien bodies,\" he said, \"they didn't tell me about it.\" The trail runs on to the Pentagon programmes of the years after 2009, and to the modern office itself.\n\nIts conclusions were blunt. AARO found no evidence that any government investigation, academic study or official panel had ever confirmed that a UAP sighting \"represented extraterrestrial technology.\" It found no empirical evidence that any recovery or reverse-engineering had taken place. Some of the alleged secret programmes turned out to be real but ordinary classified work that interviewees had \"mistakenly associated\" with alien activity. It found no authentic UAP non-disclosure agreement threatening death or violence. And it offered a diagnosis of how the belief had spread: \"in large part, the result of circular reporting,\" a small group of believers repeating one another's accounts, amplified online and in the press.\n\nThat is the official case at full strength, and the wider numbers support its tone. By 24 October 2024 the office held 1,652 reports in total. In its 2024 annual report it resolved 118 cases, \"all of which resolved to prosaic objects such as various types of balloons, birds, and unmanned aerial systems,\" and later closed 174 more the same way. The most commonly described shape in its files is a sphere. The most common answer is a balloon. \"To date,\" the office wrote, \"AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology.\"\n\nThere is a lesson about power in all this, and it cuts both ways. A secret state creates exactly the conditions in which rumour thrives: compartments no one can see across, people who know a fragment and suspect the rest, and an institution that cannot prove a negative without revealing what it does hold. The report's account of circular reporting is persuasive. So is the suspicion that an office inside the Pentagon was not shown everything.\n\nThe other side made its case under oath. On 26 July 2023 the former intelligence officer David Grusch told a House committee he had been \"informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program,\" and that he was denied access when he asked to be read in. Asked about bodies, he said \"biologics came with some of these recoveries,\" assessed as \"Nonhuman\" by people with direct knowledge, though he was clear this came from others, not from his own eyes. His statements were cleared through Pentagon prepublication review for security, which he stressed was not an endorsement. At a second hearing in November 2024 the former Defense official Luis Elizondo said \"excessive secrecy has led to grave misdeeds,\" and the journalist Michael Shellenberger handed members a document about a programme he called Immaculate Constellation. Critics of the report make a simple point: an office that never saw the most secret programmes cannot prove they are empty.\n\nAnd the report itself concedes ground. It found that in 2021, \"without sufficient justification,\" the scope of an intelligence community controlled access programme was widened to protect UAP reverse-engineering, though AARO says that programme never recovered or reverse-engineered anything. Of its own interviews it says it \"cannot discount nor rely on interviewee accounts alone.\" Its later annual report admits that \"many other cases remain unresolved,\" that 21 merit further analysis, that aircrews filed two flight-safety reports, and that three described pilots being \"trailed or shadowed by UAP.\" It has \"no indication or confirmation\" that these are foreign adversaries. Its work, it says, is \"constrained by a lack of timely and actionable sensor data.\"\n\nA second volume was due to cover interviews conducted up to April 2024. Whatever it says, the ground of the argument has already shifted. It is no longer only whether craft were recovered. It is whether anyone standing outside the deepest secrecy could ever check.\n\nPicture the paper trail the report describes: a formal request for a programme to hold alien craft, stamped, routed and rejected, and a real secret programme whose walls were raised higher to protect something it apparently never had. Somewhere in a restricted sky a balloon drifts in plain view, and somewhere in a locked file the outline of a secret sits around an empty space."},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/GOV-AARO-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"AARO Historical Record Report, Vol. I, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia, USA — An aerial view of the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., May 11, 2021. (DOD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Brittany A.…","by":"Air Force Staff Sgt. Brittany A. Chase, DOD","lic":"Public domain","lu":"","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aerial_Closeup_of_the_Pentagon,_May_11,_2021.jpg","g":false,"ct":false,"cap":"","sec":[{"src":"img/t/GOV-AARO.webp","by":"U. S. Department of Defense, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:All-domain_Anomaly_Resolution_Office_AARO_Logo.png","cap":"All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office AARO Logo.png"}]},"hh":[{"v":"1945","h":"Start of the period reviewed for US government UAP involvement","s":[354]},{"v":"No evidence","h":"Found no empirical evidence any sighting was extraterrestrial technology","s":[354]}],"hs":{"354":["AARO: Report on the Historical Record, Vol. I (PDF; site blocks automated checks)","https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/DOPSR-CLEARED-508-COMPLIANT-HRRV1-08-FEB-2024-FINAL.PDF"]}}