The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was established earlier this year by a bipartisan coalition of members of Congress who are concerned by the technological capabilities demonstrated by unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). For years the Pentagon has been worried that the UAPs buzzing air force pilots and shadowing American naval vessels have a terrestrial origin, and some foreign power has made a fantastic leap ahead.
There have been 144 such contacts between UAPs and the U.S. military from 2004 to 2021, 80 of which were captured by multiple sensors.
The Pentagon is now ramping up an investigation into the phenomena — whatever they are and wherever they come from — to determine first and foremost whether they are a threat to U.S. national security.
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Ronald Moultrie, the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, told reporters, “we have not seen anything, and we’re still very early on, that would lead us to believe that any of the objects that we have seen are of alien origin.”
The research is likely to expand next year. Congress wrote a provision into the next defense policy bill, which is awaiting President Biden’s signature, that requires the Defense Department to complete a “historical record report” about detailing unidentified phenomena observed and documented by the United States. If approved by Biden, the National Defense Authorization Act will then trigger “quite a research project, if you will, into the archives,” Kirkpatrick said.
Defense officials already are digging through old reports. Kirkpatrick, a physicist and career intelligence officer, said he will “adhere to the scientific method — and I will follow that data and science wherever it goes.” Some past reports, he acknowledged, may be highly classified and not yet known to him.
With the worldwide proliferation of drones, many UAP sightings could very well be man-made objects. Additionally, for years, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) reported that many sightings of the planet Venus were reported as otherworldly aircraft. More recently, underwater UAPs have become a concern for the Pentagon.
The recent release of the DNI report on 144 UAP sightings last year was tantalizing but found no evidence of extraterrestrials.
“Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion,” the report said. “In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings.”
Researchers involved with the report labeled the phenomena in five categories: man-made objects cluttering the air, moisture and other natural objects, man-made American aircraft, foreign-made aircraft, and a vague fifth option “other.”
The people at AARO have a lot of ground to cover — decades of sighting reports along with a continuous stream of contemporary videos and other recordings to go through. Is the answer buried somewhere in an Indiana Jones-like government warehouse? More likely, it would be buried in a filing cabinet.
Until aliens land on earth and announce themselves, most of us will withhold judgment on what exactly we’re seeing in these videos.
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