The Pentagon office in charge of fielding UFO reports says that it has resolved 118 cases over the past year, with most of those anomalous objects turning out to be balloons. But it also says many other cases remain unresolved.
This year’s legally mandated report from the Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, also identifies areas of the world that seem to be hotspots for sightings of unidentified flying objects. Such objects have been re-branded as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs.
Today’s report come just one day after a House subcommittee hearing about UAPs, during which witnesses — and some lawmakers — voiced concerns about potential alien visitations and undisclosed efforts to gather evidence. In contrast, the Pentagon’s report for the 2023-2024 time period states that, “to date, AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology.”
“AARO has successfully resolved hundreds of cases in its holdings to commonplace objects such as balloons, birds, drones, satellites and aircraft,” the office’s director, Jon Kosloski, said in a news release. “Only a very small percentage of reports to AARO are potentially anomalous, but these are the cases that require significant time, resources and a focused scientific inquiry by AARO and its partners.”
In the past, U.S. military and intelligence officials have suggested that some UAP sightings may be attributable to intrusions by rival powers such as Russia or China. The Chinese spy balloon that was intercepted and destroyed by Air Force fighter jets last year after crossing over the U.S. serves as a prime example.
AARO’s latest report says that U.S. military aircrews provided two reports over the past year that identified flight safety concerns, and three reports described pilots being trailed or shadowed by anomalous objects. “To date, AARO has no indication or confirmation that these activities are attributable to foreign adversaries,” the report says, but the office is continuing to work with the U.S. intelligence community to investigate the cases.
“None of the reports AARO received during the reporting period indicated that observers suffered any adverse health effects,” the report says.
AARO’s reporting system was established to encourage members of the U.S. military to let the Pentagon know about UAP sightings and take the stigma out of the process. Based on the latest numbers, the strategy seems to be working. Between May 2023 and June 2024, AARO received 757 UAP reports, compared with 291 reports for the period between August 2022 and April 2023.
Here are more statistics from today’s report:
- Of the 757 reports received over the past year, 485 relate to incidents during the yearlong reporting period, and the remaining 272 reports relate to incidents occurring in the 2021-2022 time frame.
- In addition to the 118 resolved cases, another 174 cases have been queued up for closure, pending a final review and approval by AARO’s director. All those cases were attributed to prosaic objects.
- Seventy percent of the closed cases in 2023-2024 were attributed to balloons. Sixteen percent were attributed to drones, 8% to birds, 4% to satellites and 2% to birds.
- AARO determined that 21 cases merited further analysis, based on reported anomalous characteristics or behaviors. Those cases are being studied by AARO’s experts as well as the office’s partners in the intelligence community and the science and tech community. “AARO will provide immediate notification to Congress should AARO identify that any cases indicate or involve a breakthrough foreign adversarial aerospace capability,” the report says.
- The remaining 444 cases received over the past year lacked sufficient data for further analysis. They’ve been placed in an archive and will be revisited if additional data comes to light. AARO says it has 1,652 UAP reports in all.
- In addition to reports from the U.S. military, AARO is receiving reports of sightings by civil and commercial pilots via the Federal Aviation Administration. AARO says 392 of the 757 reports received over the past year came from the FAA.
- AARO says unidentified lights or orb-shaped objects were mentioned most frequently in the subset of UAP reports that included references to visual characteristics. Other reports mentioned cylinders, disks, triangles, squares or exotic objects such as a “green fireball” or “a jellyfish with flashing lights.”
AARO’s global map of UAP reporting hotspots highlights four broad areas: the southeastern U.S. and Gulf of Mexico; the West Coast and Pacific Northwest; the Middle East; and northeastern Asia in the vicinity of Japan and the Korean peninsula. This doesn’t mean the aliens favor those regions. Instead, AARO says the distribution favors a “continued geographic collection bias based on locations near U.S. military assets and sensors operating globally.”
AARO says it’s getting an increasing number of cases that can be traced to sightings of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. “For example, a commercial pilot reported white flashing lights in the night sky,” the report says. “The pilot did not report an altitude or speed, and no data or imagery was recorded. AARO assessed that this sighting of flashing lights correlated with a Starlink satellite launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the same evening about one hour prior to the sighting.”
One of the reports received via the FAA mentioned a possible flight safety issue. “In this instance, a commercial aircrew reported a near miss with a ‘cylindrical object’ while over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New York,” the report says. “AARO continues its research into, and analysis of, this case.”
AARO received 18 reports from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that related to UAP incidents near U.S. nuclear infrastructure, weapons and launch sites. NRC officials attributed all those sightings to drones. One of the incidents, in August 2023, involved the recovery of a crashed drone in the vicinity of the D.C. Cook Nuclear Power Plant in Michigan — but AARO provided no further information about the drone.
What more can be done? In today’s report, AARO says its ability to resolve cases has been constrained due to “a lack of timely and actionable sensor data.”
“AARO continues to address this challenge by working with military and technical partners to optimize sensor requirements, information-sharing processes, and the content of UAP reporting,” the report says. “AARO is also expanding engagement with foreign partners to share information and collaborate on best practices for resolving UAP cases.”