AARO: The Pentagon’s UAP Office and What It Has — and Hasn’t — Found

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office was established by the National Defense Authorization Act of 2022 with a mandate that was, on paper, sweeping: investigate UAPs across all military domains, coordinate with the intelligence community, establish a historical record going back to 1945, and report to Congress. In practice, the story of AARO is one of the most revealing documents in the history of government UAP engagement — not because of what it found, but because of the obstacles it encountered trying to find it.

AARO’s first director, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, was a career physicist and intelligence officer with a reputation for rigor. He testified before Congress multiple times, published interim reports, and maintained consistently that AARO had found no verifiable evidence of non-human technology in government possession. Critics noted that “no verifiable evidence” was different from “no evidence” — and that Kirkpatrick himself had co-authored a research paper with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb noting that some UAP observations were consistent with alien probes, before publicly distancing himself from that interpretation in a military context.

In March 2024, AARO published its Historical Record Report Volume 1, covering government UAP programs from 1945 to 2023. The report concluded that AARO found no verifiable evidence of any program involved in reverse-engineering non-human technology, and no corroboration of recent whistleblower claims. The report was immediately criticized by members of Congress who pointed out that AARO’s investigators had been denied access to many of the Special Access Programs they were supposed to be reviewing — making its negative conclusions difficult to evaluate.

Multiple whistleblowers who sought to come forward to AARO reported that the office’s secure reporting mechanism was not functioning correctly. Classified complaints about UAP-related programs were, allegedly, being routed through the very chain of command managing those programs. When Sean Kirkpatrick resigned in December 2023, multiple senators and representatives publicly expressed frustration that AARO was being used to dismiss rather than investigate the claims before it.

The office that was supposed to solve the UAP mystery may itself have become part of the problem. AARO continues under new leadership. The fundamental tension — between an office tasked with finding the truth and a classification system that may prevent it from doing so — has not been resolved.