What Is AARO, and What Has the Pentagon's UAP Office Actually Found?

Background

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, almost always shortened to AARO, is the US government's current standing office for investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena, the government's preferred term covering unusual airborne, undersea, and space-adjacent objects. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks established it on 15 July 2022, in coordination with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, under authority Congress had created in the fiscal year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act. AARO did not start from nothing: it absorbed and renamed the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, itself only months old, which had in turn grown out of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force the Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence had run since 2020. Unlike its informally organised predecessor efforts, AARO is a statutory office with congressionally mandated reporting obligations to both the Pentagon and Congress, and its remit explicitly covers historical review as well as ongoing case intake.

Physicist Sean Kirkpatrick served as AARO's first director from its founding until he stepped down on 1 December 2023. Timothy Phillips served as acting director through 2024 before Dr Jon Kosloski, a quantum-optics specialist and former National Security Agency researcher, was named permanent director on 26 August 2024.

The Historical Record Report

AARO's most consequential public output to date is its Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Volume I, cleared for release on 8 March 2024. Compiled from a review of official US government investigatory activity since 1945, classified and unclassified archival research, and roughly thirty interviews with current and former officials, the report's central finding was unambiguous on the specific claim it addressed: AARO found no verifiable evidence that the United States government, or any contractor, has ever possessed, recovered, or reverse-engineered non-human or extraterrestrial technology. The report directly addressed a proposed reverse-engineering effort called Kona Blue, finding it had been formally proposed but rejected, never funded or approved, contrary to characterisations of it as an active programme.

This finding responded specifically to sworn testimony former intelligence officer David Grusch gave to Congress in July 2023, in which Grusch alleged the government held retrieved non-human craft and biological material under a decades-long, compartmentalised concealment effort. AARO's report assessed the broader crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering narrative as substantially the product of circular reporting among a small group of individuals who believed it to be true despite the absence of corroborating evidence, and Kirkpatrick stated publicly that Grusch had declined AARO's own requests to be interviewed for the review.

Case Resolution Work

Beyond the historical review, AARO's ongoing mandate is to assess individual reported cases, including video, sensor, and eyewitness reports collected under its formal reporting mechanism. Its published case-resolution work has produced mixed results rather than a uniform verdict. A February 2025 AARO analysis of the 2015 "GoFast" Navy video, one of the three widely circulated Pentagon UAP videos, concluded the object was travelling at roughly 13,000 feet rather than skimming the ocean surface as the footage appears to show, and that its seemingly extreme speed was a parallax illusion consistent with a slow-moving balloon or drone once corrected for the aircraft's own motion and the wind. By contrast, a 2026 AARO supplemental note on the "Gimbal" video, one of the same original three, stated that the object's rotation and into-wind movement were not consistent with any prosaic explanation the office had tested, including balloons, drones, or optical effects, leaving that specific case formally unresolved. AARO reports receiving several hundred new case submissions annually, roughly half of which it resolves to conventional causes such as balloons, drones, or aircraft, with the remainder closed as insufficiently documented to reach any conclusion.

Common Misconceptions

AARO's "no verifiable evidence" finding on crash retrieval and reverse-engineering is sometimes reported as though it resolved every open UAP case the government holds; it did not. The finding addressed one specific, high-profile claim, that the government secretly possesses recovered non-human technology, and left AARO's own ordinary case backlog, including videos like Gimbal, separately unresolved on their own terms. It is also a common misreading to treat AARO and AATIP as continuous with each other; AARO's actual organisational lineage runs through the Navy's 2020 task force and its 2021-22 renamed successor group, not through the earlier, unrelated AATIP research contract.

Current Consensus

AARO's 2024 finding on the specific reverse-engineering and crash-retrieval claim is not seriously disputed within the government oversight process itself; no subsequent official body has produced contrary evidence, and Congress's own criticism of AARO has centred on reporting timeliness and case-data transparency rather than on disputing that particular conclusion. What remains open is narrower than the crash-retrieval question: a share of AARO's routine case intake, including specific videos like Gimbal, stays formally unresolved, and lawmakers continue to press the office over missed statutory deadlines, including a still-unpublished second historical-record volume and a 2025 annual report that had not appeared as of AARO's most recent public disclosures.

Why This Mystery Endures

AARO occupies an unusual position in this site's UFO and UAP coverage: an office whose single most publicised conclusion, that the government does not secretly hold retrieved alien craft, is one many proponents of the crash-retrieval claim reject not because AARO's methodology has been refuted, but because the office itself is the very institution the claim alleges is complicit in the concealment. That structure, an investigator whose clean bill of health is read by believers as further proof of the cover-up rather than evidence against it, recurs across this site's cover-up claims coverage. AARO's own mixed record, a clear resolution for GoFast alongside a genuinely unresolved Gimbal case, keeps both sides supplied with material: sceptics point to the resolved case as the pattern, proponents point to the unresolved one as the exception that matters. Its unresolved case backlog and its own missed reporting deadlines guarantee the office remains a live subject rather than a closed chapter, whatever its most publicised finding concluded. AARO is part of this site's official UFO investigations subtopic, itself part of the broader ufos and uaps coverage.